Lapsed Catholics are the worst
It’s part of who they were
And who they’ll be again
(and who they’ll be again)
This one has to be fast because it hurts to sit at my computer and type it.
They tell me that I handle pain well. “They” being people who know me at all, who have seen me in pain. Friends, onlookers. Trainers. Chiropractors who feel around in my shoulders and say things like, “How did you get yourself like this?”
How did I get myself like this. Today, this time, as my upper back is locked into spasms whenever I move my head, evidently by sitting. By failing to do well enough what my coach has been having me do several times a week for months. In the past, by sitting under a friend as he leapfrogged over me – in socks on a hardwood floor – came down off-balanced and slipped, crash-landing on my head. By keeping going during a workout where something went dreadfully wrong early on and I felt like I was going to vomit – but there were only a few rounds to go. Playing soccer in the rain. Jumping into a pile of leaves face-first without thinking that there might be something hidden inside, like a big, craggy rock.
Emergency room doctor, incredulous that I managed to break (or dent, at least) my sternum: “Did you jump off a building?”
Me: “No, I jumped off the ground. Onto the ground. I didn’t know there was a rock.”
Smashing my hand with a crowbar, shutting it in a car door, trying to yank someone’s feet over his head, hitting a guy at a party because he wouldn’t leave me alone until he “showed me how to punch,” twisting my arm into a curve and inviting me to hit him in the solar plexus.
They’re always stupid, these injuries. Or unfathomable, like the time I turned to the right in a gas station parking lot and was immobilized for two weeks. Shit happens, and sometimes it happens to me. And sometimes it hurts so much it’s hilarious.
I don’t tend to cry that much. Sometimes, yes. Four days after I’d broken my wrist and left the hospital without the attending setting the bone, four days during which I’d had it wrapped, curled up in an unnatural looking arc, in an ace bandage, during which our school doctor had lied on the phone to my mother, saying he’d examined X-rays he’d never even seen, while unwrapping my arm, shaking it around, and then re-wrapping it so tightly that my fingers started to turn purple, I cried. I’ll cry from frustration or anger at my own stupidity, but rarely actually from the pain.
My mother was the ultimate badass of pain. She fell down a flight of stairs – or, in my imagination, rescued a neighbor kid from being hit by a car (I have no idea what the true story is) – and had to have her spine fused, when I was four. She was in the hospital for ages, but I was too young to be allowed to visit. The day she came home, in a rigged-up bed in the back of our tan VW van, I picked all the ripe blackberries from the bushes by the garage as an offering to her, or to whatever gods allowed her to come back to me. I played a song for her on my recorder – it can’t have been good – and learned my new sacred duty: to wash my mother’s feet. Every day, with an orange plastic basin of lukewarm water and a washcloth, I would wash her feet. Carefully, making sure not to tickle – she was and is incredibly ticklish – I would move the washcloth in circles over her tiny freckled feet, her sparsely haired legs. And when I was done she would oh-so-carefully pull her legs back onto the bed, swivel, and lay back down. If I was very good, if I laid very still, so still I almost wasn’t breathing, I could lie next to her. After months of rest, she got up and walked. But in the meantime I was in charge of her feet, in our dark brown, wood-paneled cave of a family room in the early 80s. And as a reward, we watched movies together – The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz – movies that are overlaid to this day with a certain breathless anticipation and foreboding, the threat of someone else's pain, the threat of banishment from the room if I moved.
Later, she ran her fingers through the commercial embroidery machine in our basement, breaking off needles in her bones, and still drove to meet my carpool, her bleeding hand clamped in her armpit where her turqoise puffy parka would be stained all winter. “Get in the car, we need to go to the hospital,” she said, perfectly calm. And we went.
It’s always my instinct to wonder, before getting help, “What if it doesn’t hurt badly enough? What if the doctor (or whomever) is going to laugh at me? Maybe I’m just wasting his time. Maybe I should just stay home,” to the endless, chorused frustration of those who care for me. And if we do go, if I concede and end up sitting on a table in front of a white-coated, concerned-faced whoever, my first move is always to apologize for being there. If I can’t move, if I can’t breathe, if I’m bleeding, or crying, or laughing, whatever – I know I did this to myself, that I’m the only one to blame.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the chiropractor today, after walking a mile to his office, hands shoved in my pockets so the weight of my arms dangling from their sockets wouldn’t exacerbate the pain.
“Don’t apologize to me,” he laughed, before he touched me.
A few seconds and some exploratory poking later, “How did you do this to yourself?”
And I smiled into the table, relieved. It was ok. I deserved to be there.
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