The Courage To Heal
A Tribute
Ellen Bass
We were five in a plaid dress with a sash and a little white collar.
We were nine, it was after school in the garage, the smell
of motor oil
and cut grass through the open window.
We were twelve,
fourteen, sixteen in our own beds, in seersucker pajamas
the rain pelting
down and running through the gutters.
It was a neighbor,
a priest, a stranger, our father, our mother.
It was every
day. It was when he got drunk.
It was before
our class trip to the state capitol. When our mother
was in the
hospital giving birth. Just once.
We were left
for dead.
We were barely
scratched.
We were found
in the coal bin, so wild they couldn't catch us to wash, to comb our hair
Nothing showed.
We lay at the
bottom of the stairs. We found ourselves
looking down
from a corner of the ceiling.
We found ourselves
out in the limb of a maple tree,
in the night
sky, up in the stars, where it was cool and there was so much space.
We found ourselves
in our beds.
It was morning
and our clothes laid out neatly on the chair,
our mothers
prompting us to come to breakfast.
We told an English
teacher with straight brown hair
clasped at
the nape with a silver barrette.
We told our
mother who slapped us once across the face and closed herself like a fist.
We told by
carving our skin like a pumpkin.
We never told.
We slept clutching
a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary.
By day, we
couldn't concentrate. The long division
on the blackboard
smeared in our minds.
We memorized
everything. Our handwriting
an exact replica
of Palmers cursive, only smaller.
We ate to erect
a bulwark. We wouldn't eat.
We didn't want
our bodies. We didn't want to be a part of the
food chain-eater
or eaten.
We took enough
pills to kill a horse.
We were in
a coma for a month. And we emerged in rage.
We smiled.
We smiled. We were drunk.
The first six
years of our daughter's life.
We held our
sons hand over a candle.
We somehow
knew how to mother. That gave us joy.
Deciding to
heal was a choice. The first one we ever clearly made.
We didn't decide.
The alternatives
just became too painful.
We cried every
day. We only cried once
but it went
on for a year. We never cried.
We gave up
and drove a motorcycle into a guard rail.
We threw a
chair through the window.
We stood on
the steps of the psychiatric unit
weeping about
something we couldn't remember.
We remembered
everything it seemed,
each detail
etched into the soft organ of our minds.
We blamed ourselves
because he gave us a bicycle.
We blamed ourselves
because we didn't stop it.
We blamed ourselves
because our bodies responded.
We stopped blaming
ourselves. We beat
a hundred pillows
and tore up a year's worth of the Sunday Times.
We filled forth
notebooks with writing that dug through the pages like a plow.
We said once
in a quiet voice, I'm angry.
We told our
stories and we were believed.
We told our
stories and our families denied it. Never
were we left
alone like that. It couldn't have happened.
We told our
stories and the faces that listened told theirs.
Once, we held
our fingertip up to a woman with kind eyes
and she touched
the pad of her finger to ours-for a moment.
Once, we were
rocked in a safe lap and someone smoothed
back our hair
with a tenderness not even we could deny.
But that wasn't
the end of it. It went on and on
beyond what
we'd imagined, beyond what we'd signed up for.
We sat in fear
in our own urine. Our hearts
aching in our
hollowed out chests and down our empty arms.
We thought
we would not survive.
Like stroke
patients we had to learn everything anew.
We saw how
it seeped into the corners our lives like smoke.
Nothing was
untainted, except the tough kernel we were born with,
the seed of
who we could have been, could still be.
We reclaimed
our bodies, inch by precious inch.
Feeling our
own skin, astonished, like touching a newborn.
We tried our
trust, like experimenting with drugs.
We went back
to school. We took a vacation.
We spoke the
truth. We did what we wanted.
We learned
to sleep. We ate when we were hungry.
We woke in the
morning, willing.
We wanted to
be alive. We were hungry for all we'd missed.
We took it
with eager, patient or tentative hands
but we took
it. We made a cup of tea
in our own
kitchen and drank it a blue table
on which we'd
set a small bouquet of daffodils.
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