A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  “In some ways it was worse,” my therapist said to me about the kinds of trauma I had experienced versus the kinds of physical violations that are often more validated or legitimized, discussed or understood. I’d needed the sorts of trauma I’d experienced to be legitimized, to be observed. “It wasn’t a one-time incident, but something that recurred.”

  I began seeing her only after it all became too much. “Entered first lesbian relationship, broke up with girlfriend in past two weeks, grieving her ex-girlfriend’s father’s death in a climbing accident in days after,” the intake notes say.

  Ideally conversations about trauma shouldn’t begin and end in questions of blame, or in comparison of degree. What they should reflect is consequence: that deeply felt trauma leads to real, long-lasting consequences that shape one’s future. That these consequences affect those around us. That they require time and effort to heal, and they do not simply fade on their own.

  * * *

  Finding ways to come to terms with trauma, and to heal, isn’t selfish—it’s essential. Both to self-preservation, and to finding a way to move through the world without causing harm, to oneself or others.

  The problem with re-enacting trauma, as a form of salvation, is that salvation always has the power to destroy, too. To devastate. The stakes of climbing are truly life-and-death, even if gyms will minimize them to the language of a liability waiver, even if the activity has become mainstream. I doubt there are any climbers who’ve been at it for a few decades who haven’t known someone personally who’s been paralyzed or lost their life.

  When I think of my ex-girlfriend’s father’s death, I don’t think of the moment itself. The enormity is too much to grasp. I can conjure no mental image of his fall, the full half mile of it, nor do I want to. The images I do have, of the aftermath, I try to block out. Instead I picture happy images from our last trip together. I picture his daughter’s grief.

  The only comfort might be in that he knew the risks. He chose. That is the great appeal of climbing. Unless one’s partner is at fault, the wound is self-inflicted. These wounds can be equally senseless, equally difficult to live with, but at least there’s no wonder about why someone else chose to do what they did—why they could be so unknowingly cruel.

  With a certain type of innocent climber, I wonder, sometimes, if they’re aware of the possible consequences of their new fitness routine. If the potential for loss feels real to them yet.

  You can’t manipulate the end result in climbing, without improving yourself in technical terms, in mental strength, in physicality. There’s some sort of fairness that doesn’t necessarily exist in socially constructed systems. Sometimes you don’t get the second chance.

  We carry with us the memories of those gone. On a different day, that harsh logic of gravity might’ve cost another of us. We might have made a tiny mistake, committed a small act of forgetting.

  * * *

  I finished sorting through my old gear, deciding what to keep and what to discard. I know that Jackson Falls bail biner will be there, waiting for me, unless someone has snatched it up before I return. If it’s gone, I’ll wonder whether its new owner will remember the contours of that climb, or that day. Whether they’ll palm it as a memento. Whether it’ll later appear on a different crag in a different state, for another climber to collect.

  4 SEASONAL DENIAL

  For much of my life, I lived in denial of seasons. As a child dressing for soccer practice in Colorado, for example, I didn’t learn how to prepare properly for wintertime weather. I donned my short-sleeve jersey, shorts, shin guards, long socks, and cleats, even when I was stomping through thick shoals of snow. I was the only one on the field dressed so ill-preparedly, my exposed skin reddened. Despite the freeze, I acted as though I didn’t feel the frigid air, going somewhat numb to it instead.

  As an adult in New York City, I established my habit of walking down sidewalks carefully, of hopping around large puddles at intersections where water pooled, rather than buying rain boots for torrential spring rains. Sometimes that meant taking a running leap, or glancing over my shoulder for blue Citi Bikes and cyclists before stepping out onto black asphalt. I got used to landing, in any commute, in a wet splash, my socks soggy and cold, when distracted by cabs, people, or my own thoughts. Inevitably I suffered some lapse in every journey, where I’d forget to be careful. But somehow this system of mine seemed more logical than investing in plastic boots, which would only be worn for a few days each year, and which weren’t something I’d ever learned were an essential. My motto was not to live or dress seasonally, but to live and dress the same in every season, defiantly and without reason. I forgot the seasons were going to change, until the switch was thrust upon me.

  I only changed my behavior when I moved to the Midwest, where seasonality doesn’t allow itself to be ignored in quite the same way. Where gloves are a necessity, where I own a car for the first time, where door locks freeze themselves shut, where I’ve learned about winter vehicle maintenance, about warming the engine and scraping down the windshield in the mornings and evenings.

  This sense of denial seems a family-born trait. Members of my family refuse to recognize the truth of our circumstances, until we’re absolutely forced to. This trait is beyond the comprehension of outsiders to my family, who ask, “But how could you not have known?”

  The greatest source of friction over denial within my family has been in my relationship with my oldest sister, ten years older than me. In fairness to her, she applies this principle to her own life, as well, if unwittingly. I saw this principle in action in the hours after her first chemo treatment. I was twenty-five to her thirty-five, at the time. “I want to go for a long run,” she told me, after we made our way in a cab from the Upper East Side to her apartment. “Before it’s too late.”

  She was genuinely ready to strap on her running shoes and hit the pavement for an eight- to ten-mile run, not yet ready to think of herself as someone who was ill, in the present tense, not ready to think of her beloved running routine being taken from her. I was concerned about the basics—whether she needed her prescriptions for anti-nausea medication filled, whether she was stocked up on the things I’d read about being helpful, like ginger ale. She had different concerns.

  “Maybe you should just lie down,” I tried to convince her. Within the hour the chemo had kicked in and she was passed out on her sofa, while I snuck out to Duane Reade.

  Her and my relationship has defied easy categorization, over the years. She remembers me as a baby. “You cried so much,” she used to tell me, with fond irritation. We became friends only when I was in college, when I began inviting my sisters to the climbing gym at which I worked, when we began frequenting bubble tea and frozen ice parlors near my college campus downtown, where she often treated me to large concoctions, covered in mango syrup and mochi and tapioca pearls.

  She and I grew up in different geographical states, and in different eras of my family. When she was growing up, my mother received assistance from food banks, at times, visited dental schools to get work done. My parents were still finishing their PhDs and beginning their teaching careers, at times living in different states.

  When I grew up my mother was financially successful, upwardly mobile as a tenured professor, and, in flush, happier times, she was preoccupied with things like upgrading most of the flooring in our house from carpet to hardwood and tile. My parents were living and working in different countries.

  My sister was away for college, then graduate school, then work, while I was still living at home with my mother as a child and teenager. She called home often, visited home on breaks. My mother, in particular, seemed a different person during the short visits my oldest sister made home when I was growing up. She gossiped with my oldest sister as she would a friend, her personality changed, hiding the worries that consumed her when left alone with what were, in comparison, children: my middle sister and me.

  Over the years my parents each individually re
sponded to my oldest sister as a plant responds to sustenance, their tendrils visibly firming up, drawing water through their veins, and rotating their upturned faces toward the sun.

  Still, there were signs of my mother’s decline. My mother grew increasingly concerned with financial matters when I was a teenager, obsessive beyond reason. One day she panicked over the size of her credit card bills. She’d given my oldest sister permission to use that card in graduate school, but now she worried about the figures coming in—the restaurant dinners and other amounts beyond her control. As she kept complaining to me about the situation, I called up my sister, shrilly voiced my mother’s concerns.

  “Fine, I’ll stop using the card,” my oldest sister told me, irritated, before hanging up.

  * * *

  When I was a teenager and my sisters were together, they used to play a game with me. Any time I would start speaking, one of them would cut me off. I would begin again, and the other of them would interrupt. I would keep trying to pick up the pieces of my story, and each time I did, another interruption would come, until finally I became so upset I was on the verge of tears. For some reason only I was susceptible to this game—I became visibly upset by being denied my voice, and that I could be so upset was what encouraged them to keep playing it. By the time they both relented, I no longer remembered what I’d meant to say in the first place.

  My sisters and I used to play other games when we were gathered together, too. We crowded around our giant PC, to play the CD version of Jeopardy!, in which we would each pick a different computer key to buzz in and then type our answers. We played Scrabble, which, in our literary family, was held in higher regard than more arbitrary games like Monopoly or Life.

  I remember the first time I won Scrabble, because I didn’t just win once—we played all night, my oldest sister determined to set things right by winning a game. We’d hung up a giant whiteboard above the wet-bar banister that divided our living room, and on it we tracked words in red and orange, words that had been challenged before being located in the dictionary. We stayed up, and I kept winning, time after time, proving my first win wasn’t a fluke. I’d proven my own mastery over vocabulary, over language. I’d won. Something had changed. I don’t remember ever playing again with my sisters, after that night.

  I learned early that verbalization, the ability to speak, meant running up against someone else’s narrative. I came from a family in which one person winning meant another person losing. Within my family my voice always seemed to represent a threat.

  * * *

  In college, I spoke with my mother over the phone, much as my sister had done a decade earlier. My mother repeated the same question, over and over again: “When are you coming home?”

  “I can’t come home, I’m in college,” I told her, before hanging up and drinking shots of cheap vodka from plastic jugs, as a release from the pressure valve of guilt and angst she unleashed in me, as a form of self-punishment. My mother’s only interest in these phone calls seemed to be hounding me about this question, implying my failure via absence. By “come home,” she didn’t mean come home to visit. She meant come home to live for good, and to take care of her, as she often told me.

  In these phone calls, my mother told me other things, too, things that disturbed me because they simply weren’t true. Once she told me she remembered visiting the rock wall at which I worked. “It’s pyramid-shaped,” she told me. In another call she told me about how I’d been studying and living abroad in Prague, when I’d never been to the Czech Republic. In another call she’d decided I’d become engaged to the person I was dating at the time, which I decidedly hadn’t.

  In reality I’d flown to college alone, with two suitcases’ worth of clothes, and she’d never visited me. The rock wall I worked at wasn’t pyramid-shaped, but flat. I’d signed up to study abroad in Spain, but because of the paperwork involved, I hadn’t been able to.

  It was the particularity of her imaginings that both confused me and provided her with certainty. She was so convinced of the validity of her ideas, of her reality, she often made me doubt myself, as we debated back and forth whether her firmly held beliefs were true. I tried to convey the troublesome quality of these calls to my friends, but they didn’t understand why I became so upset. “So your mother thinks you got engaged when you didn’t,” a friend said. “Just tell her you didn’t, what’s the big deal?”

  In isolation, perhaps any one instance of confusion might have seemed innocent. It was the sheer accumulation of tiny things that disturbed me. I tried, more importantly, to communicate my concerns to my oldest sister, whom I appealed to for assistance.

  Because my mother herself had for so long feared getting Alzheimer’s, this disease was the one I’d long wondered if my mother was developing. Whenever I broached the subject, though, my oldest sister said, as though the statement were final, “But she’s too young.” She often delivered this verdict in her apartment, in the presence of her boyfriend at the time, who had a PhD in biology, and who concurred with her opinion.

  Trying to sway her opinion felt a task insurmountable. She didn’t want to hear about my mother’s worrying behaviors. I’d given examples, but individually, my sister dismissed each one as explainable, as minor. In the presence of her skepticism, I failed to verbalize. I hadn’t enumerated all the many behaviors I’d seen from my mother that alarmed me. They were too numerous and too exhausting to catalogue, partially because I had only vague ideas of what normal behavior from a mother might look like. Presenting such behaviors to an unwilling audience held little appeal, particularly when I was only beginning to sort out the mess of my childhood.

  My mother had been diagnosed, at some point, with a mild cognitive impairment, and my oldest sister was unwilling to believe anything more serious was wrong. I witnessed more than I was capable of enunciating. Had I been able to enunciate it all, it would’ve been more than my oldest sister would’ve been capable of hearing. She simply didn’t want to hear me, or to entertain ideas that she believed impossible.

  My mother was finally diagnosed as I was turning twenty-one, a few months after I had graduated college, and after I had just moved to another continent halfway around the world, with my then partner.

  Though I was the youngest, somehow I was the only one able and willing to return home, to take care of my mother. Because my own independent life hadn’t yet begun, I returned to file her application for disability and to manage the first of many crises. During that time I appealed to my oldest sister for help with paperwork and tasks, but she didn’t respond with any tangible action. She didn’t help. She left me alone to deal with caretaking.

  * * *

  There always seemed to be a fundamental disconnect in how my oldest sister and I communicated. I experienced this particularly when it came to expressing things I wanted for myself, independent of my family.

  As we sat eating dinner at an Egyptian café in Bangkok, on our trip celebrating her post-chemo recovery, I told her, “I want to be a writer.”

  She responded, “I think you make a really excellent consultant.”

  It was a typical response, indicative of the quality of our communications. When I told her I wanted to go to grad school, she wasn’t supportive. She told me horror stories instead, about how it was a path to nowhere, with professorship jobs impossible to get. It was never what I had wanted—to be warned of the horrors, rather than supported in what I wanted for myself.

  Years later, when I decided I’d done as much for my mother as I was willing to do, I replicated my sister’s absence while in graduate school and while working, in favor of going to graduate school myself, and focusing on my studies rather than on making emergency trips home. She angered over this choice, in return.

  “I need you to fly home,” she told me, to take care of something related to my mother, the weekend before I needed to take the GRE. I knew doing so would throw me off balance, and I wanted, for once, to stay focused on my future.

  �
��I can’t,” I told her. I’d reached the point where I was no longer willing or able to continue returning home without forewarning, a choice for which I didn’t apologize. No one who hadn’t been there when I was growing up with my mother had any right to judge. They had no idea what I’d been through.

  Her response was to get angry, to berate me for saying no.

  My oldest sister and I thought of ourselves as the “healthy” ones, at the time; my middle sister had long absented herself from any family responsibilities. If either my oldest sister or I absented ourselves from caretaking responsibilities, it fell upon the other party to pick up the slack.

  “I just feel so alone,” she complained bitterly to me, often, a sentiment I knew well from my own upbringing. She, too, had left me alone.

  * * *

  When I am thirty-three and my sister forty-three, we have a long phone conversation, nearly six hours long, in which we discuss our complicated family history. Our mother has just died. I’ve just been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, one with roots in both genetics and environment.

  My oldest sister admits to me, about having been expected, implicitly, by my parents, to pass on lessons they’d passed on to her, to have a hand in taking care of me and my middle sister, “I resented it.”

  I’ve always sensed this resentment from her, regardless, don’t need her to admit it to me. It comes across in the little things—the way she’s kept her social circles hidden from view, the way other transplanted siblings living in the city share apartments or live in the same building, where she has always made clear she wants her geographical distance from us, that she values her independence above all.