scars. and healing.

My eyebrow has this little sliver of a space where no eyebrow grows.

It’s a scar.

From nearly forty years ago.

I fell right out of my bunk bed when my younger brother was born and he was handed over my crib and I was forced to move to a top bunk bed.

I fell right out of that bed in the middle of the night, directly hitting the hard wood floor far below on my wee little eyebrow.  I needed middle of the night stitches and my head still bears the mark and my memory carries the story and it’s all right there, written on my face in a tiny scar on my eyebrow.

My left shin has an ugly little scar too.  I can’t remember the first time it was wounded but I clearly recall the second wound.  It was already a large scrape with an emerging scab and it was in mid-healing.  I was on the back of a giant farm truck in the middle of a field.  My little brother – there he is again – all guilty of so many wounds for me apparently – and I were armed with heavy shovels and doing some sort of manual labor, as was our normal summer routine.  He’s flinging his shovel.  I’m walking.  Bam!  Metal shovel hits shin.  Blood.  Pain.  Ripped shin.  And it’s still visible today – more than twenty years later.  A rubbery-looking gouge right in the middle of my shin.

Stacks of scars.

They don’t hurt any longer – like, no physical pain at all.

But they still tell this story.  They still appear and are visible and they are evidence of a past wound inflicted, a former pain endured.

They are both a sign of life and a sign of sorrow.

I’m sitting with other scars now too, of course.

We all are.

As a grown up, I’m sitting with and wrestling through still fresh and bleeding wounds that are healing, and scarring, right now.

Wounds from words spoken, relationships broken, promises unkept.

Wounds from betrayal and hope deferred and hope punched right square in the jaw.

Some of the wounds are managing to seal up pretty nicely.  Some are still oozing uncomfortably.

I’m tending to the wounds and the scratches and the scars of my children, like a mother bear to her cubs – with little licks and tucked in safe under arms and carrying them about when they can’t walk for themselves.

We’re all a healing, hurting mess over here.

But we’re okay too, you know?

I mean, I have decided that both can be true at the exact same time.

You can have scars and you can have blood and even a side dish of puss (it’s the grossest word in existence – am I right?) and still be living and pressing on forward.

I know this is true because it is a picture of the life I am living currently.

The healing is just as evident as the scars.