Scars

My life is a tapestry of scars.

When I was nearly eight, the top item on my birthday wish list was my very own pocket knife. We lived in the jungle. There were so very many things I could do with a knife in the jungle. My brothers had knives. I needed one. So I pleaded and begged and my birthday arrived and my parents gave me my perfect, silver pocket knife – and a caveat. If I cut myself, I had to give it up until they decided I could handle a knife properly.  

They had good cause for imposing that caveat. I have a long history of unwittingly inviting harm to my person. When I was three, my brother was using a machete to cut weeds in the yard. I thought it would be fun to sneak up and surprise him… barefoot. That scar is still faintly visible.

When I was five, my other brother’s pet monkey bit me. I was nearly six before I learned to crawl under a barbed-wire fence without tearing up my backside.

I was thinking about scars the other day (as I held my finger in the air, stanching the flow of blood). Embracing life is almost an invitation to accumulate scars, both inside and out.  I was thinking about free choice (as I rummaged for bandages), and how it means we get to choose our response to the things life throws our way. We can roll ourselves up in metaphorical bubblewrap, too frightened to walk out the front door. We can arm ourselves to the teeth – literally and figuratively – determined that we will get before we are gotten.

Or we can incorporate our scars and keep embracing life. Messy, painful, rewarding life.

On my eighth birthday. I took that beautiful, silver pocket knife and ran out to find something to carve. Less than two hours later, I tried unsuccessfully to sneak back into my room to hide the knife before Mom or Dad could see the trail of blood behind me.

Losing my knife didn’t stop me. There’s the scar from the chisel, from when Ruby and I tried to make wooden shoes (we couldn’t.) That’s next to the scar from the butcher knife, on the hand with the scars from sailing off my bike into a pile of sand and gravel. Dogs, plastic boxes, car doors, turtles: there was no malice and yet I bear the scars that prove our paths once crossed.

Scars create texture in our stories and I don’t regret my collection. I actually cherish a few of the ones you can’t see. Scars form when there’s healing, and I’m grateful for healing.

As I stood there wrapping my latest wound, I thought about my parents and how they could have only protected me from harm by keeping me from life. I’m grateful they didn’t.

My finger will soon sport a new scar. I must be slowing down, though. This time I cut myself on the soap dish.

[canstock csp21011106 / Milo827]