Scars

I have scars on my knees.

From an accident when I was 10 years old.

Remember those days when you left the house in the morning and your parents said, “Come back just before dark?”

One day, I didn’t make it back in time.

And my mother came out to find me in the family car.

She found me a mile or so from our house. I was on my bike, and after she gave me a good talking-to, we headed toward the house. I was going fast because I knew she was mad—and as I sped up our driveway in the dark, the headlights of my mother’s car illuminating my path, I skidded on some sand.

I fell.

Hard.

My mother was so angry that she left me alone in the bathroom to care for my own scrapes. I remember washing pebbles and sand from the cuts, crying, and feeling bad that I had worried her, and my knees hurt.

For years afterwards, I thought I had the scars so I would never forget that moment. Kind of like an eternal punishment.

And here I am, over four decades later, thinking about them.

Rumi believed something different about scars. He said, “A wound is where the light enters the body.”

Tear open your knees, and there is opportunity for light and forgiveness to enter?

Yet even knowing that we heal from our pain, how many of us move through the world with a backpack full of Kleenex and Band-Aids to comfort others? How many of us are cleaning others’ scrapes every single day?

I was listening to an audiobook about codependency recently, and the author was talking about the mostly fruitless endeavor of trying to fix other people’s pain. It’s all about controlling the environment. Making everyone happy. I thought, “I do that!” If someone is upset, I want to make them feel better. If someone is crying, I want to help them stop. I want them to move through their pain faster. Or at least help them to think about something else.

But what is lost in that moment of me scrambling to soothe that someone?

When you slap a Band-Aid on a wound, the wound is still there, covered in darkness.

Yet as human beings, we are trained to soothe others. To take away their pain. To make them happy.

Recently, on a flight, I saw a father soothing his crying child. He was standing by the bathrooms where there was space to move around. Whenever the toddler started to fuss, the father started bouncing the little boy up and down. Eventually, he stopped crying. Even fell asleep once or twice.

So, where is the balance? When do we know to ease another’s suffering and when do we allow them to find their own peace?

I remember having to learn how to let my own child cry himself to sleep. Someone told me, “You have to teach him that there is a time to be awake, and a time to sleep. So, you have to let him cry himself to sleep, so he learns that it’s night.”

That made sense.

But obviously, with children, we have to wipe their tears. They don’t always have the agency to do so for themselves. But if we go pick them up every single time out of the crib, they never learn how to cross that edge of their own pain and grief.

As adults, it’s easy to fall into caretaking relationships. I have been there more than once: An alcoholic ex. Snowplowing the path for my adult child. Friends who take more than they give.

But even though I have some scars from those relationships, those wounds also made me stronger. More discerning. Light has come through. I do have a greater sense of peace.

I have learned that most of us have to hit bottom though. We may have to fall deep into that pit of despair. But once you do, once there is nowhere to go but up, the wounds start to heal. And that’s when the light starts to come in.

I no longer think the scars on my knees are a form of eternal punishment.

I now think they are there to help me remember my mother’s love. So I will never forget how she came out into the darkness to find me.