recovery – Kimberly Bryant, MA

Did you ever pick at scabs when you were a kid? Those big, juicy ones that crusted on your knees and elbows from all the falls you took when on the monkey bars or on your bike? I did. It hurt, it made my scrape open up and bleed some more, but I just couldn’t help reopening the wounds. It didn’t matter if the grown-ups explained that I was going to have scars if I didn’t leave the scabs alone. Potential infection didn’t deter me, I just picked away!

As I got older, the wounds became less literal. Not skin and bone- heart and soul. When I was seventeen, I broke up with a boyfriend that I had been dating for over a year. He was a good guy, but timing just was not right: he was in college, I was a senior, yada yada yada. Weird thing, though, I kept driving by his house. I would sit outside, not crying, really, but grieving. Pretty dramatically, I suppose. It felt good to wallow.

In college, I auditioned over and over to be a hostess for our annual Follies. I never did get to do it. That was tough, because I had to sit in the auditorium for chapel every day, and look at the stage where I felt so defeated.

Until I decided to stop auditioning for the thing I was never going to get and direct my club’s show, a sentimental journey through the tunes of the Andrews Sisters, which won first place. Then that space, that stage, became a symbol of power (as long as I governed my thoughts). Wounds don’t just come from romance or falls. Sometimes they come from being shut out.

When my husband changed jobs and we moved from Texas to Oklahoma, I used to sit at my picture window, gazing out while wistfully wishing to move back to a town that, if I am honest, I was miserable in. I even envisioned my own woe, creating a mental picture of the melancholy pose I struck as I sighed. I looked, in my own mind, as gorgeous as any Gothic heroine. I should have been dressed in a while linen empire-waisted gown, though in truth, I was probably covered with graham cracker goo and baby spit-up, hair going every which way.

When we left Oklahoma to go back to Texas, after two weeks I called a church deacon and begged, “Please let us come back. Please.” They said no. They said, “Look forward. Not back.” It would be a while before I understood how to do that. And did it. I had to figure it out myself, because I hadn’t really seen it before.

Ten years after her divorce, my mom still sat with her wedding album, flipping through plastic-encased portraits of her happy day, remembering a time when she was joyful, healthy, and surrounded by bridesmaids. Really, her entire adult life was spent, I believe, looking back: wishing to undo mistakes, wishing to be young and happy, wishing to have close friends.

Revisiting sites of injury was a family trait. Sometimes those sites were physical, like boyfriend’s houses, scabs, or stages. Sometimes not, though. I could not possibly account for the hours I have spent, in my own mind, replaying scenes in which I hurt someone or someone hurt me.

But now I don’t. I just don’t go to places that hurt. I have made the conscious choice to avoid hurting myself. When I reflect on it, I think I made the decision to stop visiting hurtful places around the time I also made the decision to stop cutting myself with scissors.

I was a late comer to the cutting thing. When I was a teen, I didn’t even know that was a thing you could do to alleviate sorrow and anxiety, so I tried the pursuit of perfection and the allowance of boys defining my identity, with a bit of disordered eating thrown in for good measure. In my thirties, though, I found it. Cutting, I mean. Sometimes I escaped to the little office in my theatre classroom to grab scissors from the apple crock in which I still keep pens and pencils, and I would dig deeply into my arm. At home, I might grab a kitchen knife and lock myself into the bathroom, cutting my thighs. It burned. It hurt. And it gave me more scabs to pick at.

I don’t cut myself anymore. I am not ashamed of that chapter, I will talk about it if I am asked. But it’s not my favorite thing to revisit.

There are also places I don’t visit. I have only been to my mother’s grave once, and to my father’s never (beyond the days of their funerals). It is too hard. It opens floodgates of sorrow, sorrow that is close enough to the surface of my heart that tears and heartache don’t need gravestone markers to incite them. For some, visiting those graves is a comfort, and I say, “Go. Please, and tell them I love them while you’re there.”

Churches are a no-go. Way too much hurt inflicted when my husband was in, and then out, of youth ministry. Way too many Sunday mornings when no one said hello. Way too many judgements and proclamations and “encouraging words” masking an assumption about who I am and what I need.

I tried going into the auditorium of the high school where I spent eight years building the theatre program from the ground up, and which I left because of a combative administration. The day I went there, I was laid low, emotionally tender and teary-eyed for days. So I don’t go back in there any more. I know my former students wondered why I didn’t come see their shows, they were so sweet to invite me, but I just couldn’t.

We sold the home we spent the bulk of our child-rearing years in, I can’t drive by it, I just can’t. And the house I just sold last year, the one we built from the ground up? No way. When mail was delivered there for a month or so after our move, my husband had to go pick it up.

I don’t visit the local community theatres, not even to see shows. Those are places that have become like great big, giant triggers. Sitting in them feels like little bits of broken glass all over my skin while I am reminded of so many times of being overlooked.

Some places, some people, some memories, just hurt a little too much. Is there beauty in pain? There can be. Is there growth in pain? Often. Is there a benefit, though, in reopening old wounds, wounds that aren’t festering or infected, but are still vulnerable? Not for me. I have had to learn to stop standing at the picture window, sighing and mooning. No more drive-bys to old scenes of hurt.

Like the Fleetwood Mac song says,

“Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done?
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do.”

Everyone’s life has been bad at one point or another. I suppose we all have different ways to heal and protect.

Shielding my quiet soul means choosing where I go. For me, self care doesn’t look like spa facials and chocolate truffles. It looks like a picket fence, covered in flowering vines, protecting me from turning back. It looks like my yoga/meditation room. It looks like my yellow bicycle. It looks like screen shots of texts from my close tribe of trusted friends. It looks like writing a book instead of directing or acting a play script. It looks like my husband and children. It looks like…my life.

My first memory of her is a body curled up, sleeping with her back to the living room, South Carolina sunlight streaming in the windows. I was three years old, and my mother was napping. Almost every memory of her after, no matter what age I was, includes a couch.

That first couch was a deep red with a Spanish styled print. I don’t remember that from being three, but from having sat on the edge of that couch right through seventh grade. That couch moved from Tennessee to South Carolina to Texas.

It’s always puzzled me, that couch. Red? My mom loved yellow and orange. Spanish? She hated all things Latin. A shield with crossed swords hung on the wall along with what I think was a painting of a bull fighter or something. The coffee table was a heavy wood with Spanish style turned spindles and doors trimmed in burnished brass. Where in the world did all of that come from?

She liked to call me to come sit on the couch to talk to her sometimes. She might ask about my day at school, what boys I had crushes on. Interestingly, she rarely asked about my female friends. She asked about teachers. She told me that I must go to college.

She lay there and smoked cigarettes, drank Coke or Pepsi with lemon, and watched television for my entire childhood. Soap operas, game shows, and classic horror and sci-fi were her tv of choice. She didn’t mind if I joined her for game shows or “Lost in Space,” but when it was time for “Guiding Light” or “Days of Our Lives” I had to make myself scarce.

She never got up and went to the bed in the bedroom that she shared with my dad in name only. Sure, her clothes hung in a closet in that bedroom, and there was a dresser where she had drawers of underwear and socks and chiffon nightgowns left from her bridal days. But she rarely went in that room. She was on the couch 24/7. One time, when I was about twelve, I got out of bed to get a drink of water and found my father laying on top of my mother on that couch. Sex happened on the couch. Meals happened on the couch. Sleep happened on the couch. Her life was lived on the couch.

Right around my eighth grade year, we bought a new couch: sort of a nubby weave of lime green and golden yellow. I didn’t sit on the edge of that one quite as often, as the divide between my mother and I began to widen. Confiding in her was dangerous- if I shared something I was worried about she would use it against me in an angry moment. Her own depression began to sink her into an apathy of lethargy and sleep.

Perhaps my most vivid couch memory was the day it tipped over. Let me set the scene:

It’s summer, 1979. I am out of school, my dad is at work, and my little brothers are outside playing. My mom seems…off. Her speech is slurred, she’s holding on to the walls as she makes her way to the toilet. I call my dad at work, he asks if I can just stay nearby and keep an eye on things. So I grab a book (most likely a Ramona Quimby story) and catalogs and settle down on the shag carpet for a quiet day of reading and looking at clothes in the Sears Big Book; and I watch.

My mom comes back from a bathroom trip, sits down on the couch, then pitches forward headfirst over the coffee table. Her feet were tucked up under the edge of the couch, so it flipped backward.

Turns out she was completely strung out on pain killers. This was the day we learned about my mom’s addiction.

My mom was…difficult. When she was young, people tell me she was engaging. A tremendously talented athlete. In many ways she was brave- she could face down a speeding softball, catching it and pivoting to throw it to first base in the blink of an eye- this was a gift that I saw a glimpse of when she convinced me to join the church softball league with her during one of the infrequent “good spells.” She was fast as a whippet, graceful on the field despite the numerous broken noses and arms (fearless on the softball field, nothing would stand in the way of getting on base or stopping that ball- not even her face).

She was also beautiful. there are photos that show this to be true, even after she married my dad and had me. Big blue eyes, golden olive skin, blonde hair coiffed to perfection, and impeccable style in clothing, she was a knock out.

But something changed for my mom. Depression and probably bipolar disorder intervened. I say “probably bipolar disorder” because that really wasn’t a thing that was being diagnosed in the early 1980’s. Instead, she was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which isn’t quite right, but maybe as close as a 1982 psychologist could get.

Women didn’t typically have careers in the late 1960’s and 70’s. They were housewives. I don’t know that my mom found much joy in this. I think she was lonely and bored. It’s not that she didn’t love us. But she was just too sad. So she slept a lot, watched a lot of TV, got depressed, then got addicted, then got crazy. All on the couch.

The last time I visited my mom in her section 8 apartment, where she was living alone, my husband and I slept on the double bed that my grandfather had given her. She said she had tried to sleep on it, but she just couldn’t. She was still sleeping on a couch. This time, an old couch that I think might have come from the Goodwill store. She died when she was living in that apartment.

When we packed it up, my husband and I took the bedroom furniture, but not the couch.

And when I enter a home, friend’s home, or even my own home, I don’t sit on the couch unless there just are not any other options.

A few months ago, I decided I would try to join my husband on the couch- that’s where he likes to hang out. I spent about a week propped up against the arm rest, tucked under a blanket, and having flashbacks to seeing my mom living on her various couches. Not just chilling for a bit, but living. I moved back to my chair.

It’s funny how we are shaped in the strangest ways. An innocuous piece of furniture that exists in nearly every American home can become a subtle, subconscious reminder to me of that child, preteen, adolescent, then young married woman that I was, who observed the long, slow decline of my mom from happy and vibrant young mother to lonely and sad woman. And then, because I can, because somehow I figured out how to step out of her shadow, I rise each day. I sit in an office chair at work, I read in a wicker patio chair in the evening, I watch TV from my comfy chair and then sleep in a bed with my guy every night.

I just never sit on the couch.

Tag: recovery

Turning Back

No, I Would Not Like To Sit On the Couch, Thank You.