When pain looks like love, how do you know the difference?
Featuring Olympic-level efforts at silent treatment!
Read this post on my blog.
The Poem of the Day was Having a Fight with You. I click.
is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV
My heart starts to race. I know those feelings—of not being able to breathe, not being able to move. In the corner of my bedroom on the floor while my mom stood over me, hitting me. Or trapped and naked on my dad's lap while his hand spanked and slapped.
It's like waking with scalpels
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.
I have to stop. Why don't I look away?
In 1983, I routinely skipped class and listened to Every Breath You Take. One kid said, "That guy's a stalker. The lyrics are creepy."
I thought it would be nice for someone to care that much.
I didn't have friends that year, so it took until 1983 for people to notice that the police removed me from my parents' home.
Having a fight with you
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper
that says you never loved me—
I have to tell myself I didn't write that stanza. I am not in a fight now. I can step back and breathe.
But when I try to step back, I have to admit something I don't want to say, because I'm so old, and I think you'll think: It's so sad that she still cares about this, why can't she just move on?
Now that I have my own children, it's incredible to think this is possible, but I know it's true that my mother never loved me.
my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.
One morning I woke up hoping it would be the day my mom started talking to me. She was on her second week of silent treatment. I remember watching her walk into the bathroom and sit on the toilet. She didn't shut the door and didn't look at me.
After school, after it got dark, I waited in the foyer for my dad to come home. I greeted him with a huge, loud excited hug, happy to have someone to talk to. But my hands were dirty, and he said, "You ruined my shirt!" He whipped off his suit jacket, tackled me and straddled my body to pin my legs.
That's when Mom's silent treatment stopped.
"Stop! David! Stop!" I don't remember this, but I heard her tell this story many times to show people that there was a time she stopped him from beating me. "He would have killed you," is what she says every time she tells the story. She says she saved my life.
I come back to this poem when I want to feel tight in my tummy, dizzy in my head. This time I have a pain in my ear and I'm not sure why. Wait. I just remembered the last time I went to school with a note from my dad. It said, "Please excuse the last two days of absence. She was sick."
My teacher looked at the note and then looked at me. "Is there anything besides the black eye?"
"Yeah, my ear hurts."
"Did your dad do that to you?"
Oh. Wait. What? "How do you know to ask that?"
Thirty years later, when I asked one of my high school friends if she knew, she couldn't believe I was asking: "The debate coach took you out of school to buy you clothes. No one was hiding anything."
I don't keep the poem on my phone. I make myself search for it so I have time to prepare to feel that ear. I couldn't feel it back then - there was so much going on. So I want to feel it now, to sit right back in 1983 and feel my ear throbbing, my bottom stinging like sunburn from my dad's spanking.
Because it's hard to believe that it happened. I had to work so hard to not let it bother me. Now I have to go back and be bothered. And I'm so bothered that I feel hopeless. How will I one day stop coming back to this poem? Will I come one day and read those first words without feeling smothered by my mother's hate?
On a lark, I read Poem-a-Day where Patrick Phillips describes his poem Having a Fight with You as a reply to the poem Having a Coke with You by Frank O'Hara.
What.
O'Hara's poem is a sweet, funny, loving moment—two men being in love. And Phillips' poem is the reply? The other side of love? Phillips says his poem is about how the intensity of falling love is just like the intensity of pain in a fight. But I can't imagine having the fight and love at the same time. And if I had love like those two guys having a Coke, I don't think I'd survive the disappointment and pain that comes from fighting. I wouldn't trust that love comes with fighting because I've never seen it.
But knowing the connection between the poems gives me hope. If I can feel this much pain, then maybe I can feel that much love.
Thank you for this. It's an offering to your readers, but maybe, it's an offering to yourself also. To put more separation between what you've learned by loving your own children, and that past that can't be anything but painful.
your gutsy brave courage to remember and then write and then share - I think that it means it is time for someone you trust to hold you and assure that they will always care and be there for you!
may it be so!