When I was in my first year of primary school I fell in the playground and cut my knee up pretty bad. I still have the scar. It was the first deep cut I ever had and I watched the healing process with fascination. At first there was Germolene and gauze and big fat plasters. Then there was fresh air and a thick black scab. And as the scab began to fall away there was the miraculous wonder of delicate fresh pink skin. Brand new skin. That I grew. I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea I had such a capacity.
I’ve recently realised that just the sight of a newborn baby makes me almost want to cry. I saw a 3-week-old baby in a restaurant last month and as I spoke to tell the mother how beautiful her child was I could feel the emotion rising in my throat. The vulnerability of it all. This tiny baby. That fresh pink skin. The young mother with the responsibility for a whole entire new life.
Before becoming a parent I was able to gloss over all of this. But when you’re faced with a fragile brand new human, especially one that moves into your house, you can deny it no longer. Your whole world suddenly rests on the continued beating of a tiny little heart. You look at this baby and can’t help be haunted by the thought of some horrible thing that could happen this moment or the next. And along with everything else, that’s the reality of life. We’re just a bunch of tiny fluttering hearts in a world of unpredictable and mighty forces.
Childbirth left me with a scar. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it for weeks. It was too much to lay my eyes upon. Too delicate, too deep, too painful. I somehow feared looking at it might make it worse. “Can you believe they cut me?” I’d exclaim to John in the dead of night. “Maybe I should go and cut him and see how he likes it.” It had not been part of the birth plan.
There’s a lot we don’t look at because it’s too fragile and sore. The total fragility of ourselves and our lives is what we work so hard to deny. And our denial often takes the form of aggression. We harden to the world and to each other. We’re trying to protect ourselves but it doesn’t make us any safer. If anything, it puts us more at risk.
When we lay down our anger and look towards the things that scare us we get to see the resilience and capacity for healing that was waiting there for us all along.
