Sensitive

The bruise on my forehead is an ugly patchwork of blues and yellows. It will be a week old tomorrow but it's still sensitive to the touch. I try to hide it behind my hair because otherwise people tend to gape and ask questions.

I almost wish I had a more dramatic story to explain what happened because the truth is a bit humiliating. It was raining. I was at the store and wanted to get into the car quickly. I whacked myself in the head with the corner of the car door. Instant swelling. Ugh.

By the time I got home, I had a bump the size of a small hen's egg over my left eye. I'll never forget the look on my husband's face. He was horrified. "Just get me the ice pack," I said. I didn't want the girls to see it because I knew I looked like a monster. But really, how was I going to hide it from them?

At dinner both of my girls had to see the "boo-boo" on my head. Rita, who's three, looked up at it with her mouth wide open. "I can kiss it, Mama," she said. She looked so scared that I had gotten hurt. It was upsetting to see her this worried, and it brought me back to a time when I saw my own mother get hurt and I was equally afraid.

I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. My mother had decided that she wanted to start exercising more regularly, so she took a ride on my sister's ten-speed. Only five minutes later she was back and it was clear that she was hurt. She had been riding along the side of the busy road that ran close to our house. For some reason she was looking over her shoulder and she rode right into a telephone pole. She hit it full force with the side of her face. It was swollen and bruised and she was crying.

I remember feeling very scared and worried. What if she had really done damage? Should we bring her to the hospital? I called my friends down the street and spoke with their mom. I told her what happened and I fully expected her to come down and make everything right, but instead she laughed at me. "She'll be fine," she said. In hindsight, I’m sure she was right but at the time I was really angry at her reaction. My mother was crying and I needed someone to fix it.

Maybe it was because my mother has always been so careful about not showing her emotions, but I was totally freaked out to see her so hurt and upset. It was out of the ordinary and I didn't know what to do with it. I was convinced that she needed to seek immediate medical attention.

So, now I know where my first instinct came from, the one that said that I shouldn’t show my girls the giant bump on my head. It's ingrained in me not to show my kids things that may make them uncomfortable. In the end, it was probably better that they did see it. And, they saw me put ice on it to bring the swelling down.

It seems that the lesson for me here is that it's okay for my kids to see that occasionally one of the grownups in their life may be hurt - physically or emotionally - but that we can (and do) make it through the pain to be okay again. God, who would have thought it would take 40+ years to figure out something that seems so simple?

Going Round and Round

Work! I'm doing work right now. What is the matter with me? It's my writing night but because I won't be in the office for the next two days, I'm tidying up a bunch of email. This is not what writing night is all about. I am supposed to be sitting here, thinking about witty things that I can write short essays about. And, truth be told, I have a backlog of unfinished posts that I am having trouble finishing. I'm not sure why this is.

My semester as a grad student is finished and most of my big events at work are wrapped up until the fall, but I seem to be spinning my wheels here. I was hoping to spend time this summer writing for fun and maybe trying to publish something (while trying not to get my hopes up on this - plus, I that means I would actually have to finish something and submit it). I have set aside one night a week as writing night where I get together with a friend who is on deadline to finish her dissertation. I also get up early to write three pages of whatever comes to me in the morning.

For the past two weeks, I have been unable to complete anything concrete. I scribble in my notebook or I surf the web. Maybe I am still coming down from a very intense time and I just need to give myself a break. But at some point, I think I just have to write and finish something - and here I was about to go on to say, "or give up on this dream" but then I literally stopped myself and deleted those words before they were finished. I mean, who cares if I don't finish a thing? If I don't create a single, coherent written piece? I just like the act of writing, of choosing words and phrases that go together and linger in my head for a while, that I can see on the screen or on the page.

The act of writing helps me to process things differently than I do when I am just in my head without pen and paper or keyboard. I often end up in a very different place than I imagined I would when I started. It's like somewhere in my brain there's a path I have to follow and it feels comfortable and familiar but I don't know where it leads until I get there - and then when I do get there, I realize that there is still a lot more path ahead. I guess this is my roundabout manifesto on why I need to keep pursuing this act of writing, without judging how or where it's going.