Time-Traveling Trauma

My mom was not the only one who put her hands on me unkindly when I was growing up, but she was certainly the person who did it the most.

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On Sunday morning, before I settled down onto the couch with my coffee and a new book, I did a quick-clean of the downstairs, like I do every weekend. The last chore was cleaning the living room blinds, after which I removed the microfiber head from the hand duster and tossed it into the laundry basket. As I was walking back toward the kitchen to put all my cleaning supplies away, I stumbled and hit myself in the thigh with the empty plastic prongs on the duster. It made a loud SMACK! that rang out across the room, and I immediately dropped it to the floor. Not because it hurt me that bad or anything, but because as soon as I felt the contact and heard the noise, I thought, "Woof, my mom would have loved this thing."

Not for dusting, though. My mom would have loved it for hitting me on purpose. It was just the style of thing she preferred: sturdy at the base, flimsy at the top, like a fly swatter or a switch that got progressively thinner at the tip. (Do you know switches? They're branches, cut from trees, used for punishment.) My mom didn't like a thick switch, and if I ever brought one back when she sent me out to the edge of the woods in our backyard to choose my own rod for discipline, she'd send me right back for something with more whip to it. I don't know if she liked the cracking sound it made, or the welts it left behind. I think maybe it was that I never reacted to getting hit with something thick and hard, but I couldn't help myself from making a hissing sound when I got hit with something that stung me. Thick switches make you bruise; thin switches make you bleed. Maybe she preferred the blood, a visible reminder of her power over me.

My mom was not the only one who put her hands on me unkindly when I was growing up, but she was certainly the person who did it the most. Those memories haven’t faded like so many others, like the edges of a photo worn down by time. I remember the exact design on the brown leather belt my dad used when I had to go to a whole different room and wait for him to come in and punish me. The weird almost-rash that always appeared a few days after my mom's mom got me with a folded wire clothes hanger. The way my mom's dad's fist felt so weird colliding with my cheek because he was missing some fingers on account of his job at a sketchy furniture-building factory. The look on my great-uncle's face when I saw him, as an adult, at a family event at church and told him that if he ever came near me again, I would kill him. A look that said he knew my threat was righteous, and that I wasn't joking.

I'll never ever understand the violence that was leveled at me in my youth. I mean, I was a rowdy, mouthy thing, but I was still a child. I was just… a child.

Now that I've lived long enough to be the same age as the adults who hurt me when I was younger, I can say, with complete certainty, that I would never — ever, ever, ever in a hundred bazillion gadrillion years — hit a child. Like, even just saying that seems so simple in its moral correctness. I would never hit a child, because… who would hit a child?

When my nephew was about six years old, I one time had to use my body to pin him against my truck in a parking lot because he was trying to make a break across six lanes of traffic to get back to the store we'd just left. He was scream-crying and kicking and slapping and punching, making contact with his tiny body against my giant body any way he could.

"Please stop wiggling and trying to escape into the highway!" I begged. "Please tell me why you're crying!"

He kneed me in the shin and shouted, "I WANT ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR THE THOMAS TRAIN!"

After some deft maneuvering, I finally got us both inside the cab of my truck, and we sat there, sweating, breathing hard, buckled in, for a good five minutes. Finally, I said, "Hey, did I hurt you? Please tell me if I did because I never want to hurt you. I want to apologize and make it right. I never want to cause you any pain."

He wiped his nose with his sleeve and said, "No, sometimes I just REALLY want what I want. And I WANTED that train.”

He kicked out his feet and laughed at himself — and oh, the relief I felt knowing he'd never feel the sting of an adult harming his little body. Knowing that I wasn't even capable of doing what had been done to me. Because if any adult had ever tried to smack him with a clothes hanger, I'd have launched them into the sun.

My cats come to me for comfort for every little thing that frightens or annoys them, and none of them have ever flinched away from me, not even once. I've never given them any reason to fear me.

When I accidentally hit myself with the duster prongs on Sunday, my immediate reaction was to panic. Trauma time-travels, and so, for a second there, I was ten years old. I plopped down in my office chair, in my freshly clean home, and started grounding myself. I love a neat and tidy house, and I love the process of keeping it so. It feels like more than maintaining order in the rooms where I live; it feels like lovingly tending the space my wife and I have matured into together, as we've grown with each other, over the past 14 years. Her things and my things and our things, the ones we brought into our life together and the ones we've acquired as a pair.

The stories attached to the stuff, like some of the editing awards she's won. They won't fit into her office in Manhattan with all her other trophies, so they're sitting on the bookshelf — but you'll never see them because success makes her bashful, so she frames every photo she takes to cut them out of the picture. My feminist fantasy and sci-fi books on one side of the bookshelf, her queer literary fiction on the other. The way we inexplicably have two copies of The Catcher in the Rye. The accessibility stairs and ramps that Socks uses to climb up and down on our furniture, and the two separate times we've devoted every waking moment to rehabbing him after terrible falls that temporarily paralyzed him. My art supplies and Stacy’s records. My Mario games and her Sonic games. The art we've chosen, slowly, over the course of our life together. The bright blue high school-looking locker we bought the first time we went shopping for furniture, stuffed to bursting with DVDs.

Everyone who has ever walked into our home has said, "Wow, this place is so y'all." And it really is, so very us.

I don't think a lot these days about how much I got hit when I was growing up. Mostly because I don't have to, because nothing in my life now reminds me of my life back then. There's no yelling, grabbing, smacking, hitting, shoving, slamming, or throwing things. Every time Stacy touches me, her face and heart and hands are full of love and tenderness — and sometimes, even after all these years, a little bit of awe. We solve our problems by talking; we are endlessly grateful, out loud; we find ways to delight in each other; we laugh and we apologize and we mean both of those things.

That duster would have been a weapon used against me when I was a child. And yes, it startled me to realize it, so viscerally. But, in my grasp, it's just a duster. And a belt is just a belt. And a clothes hanger is just a clothes hanger. And the only hands coming anywhere near my face are wearing a wedding ring I placed on one of those fingers, hands that belong to a woman who has only ever kept me safe.

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