Excerpt from 'Face, A Memoir,' Part Four

This is Part Four of Face, A Memoir. In Parts One, Two and Three, we find out I have been hit by a car at the age of five and have lost my left cheek and eyelid. After five weeks in the hospital, I come home, and my mom and dad prepare my sister and brother for a Marcia whose face was ravaged.

Part Four

“Marcia is coming home this afternoon, and she looks different than she did,” my mom explained. “You shouldn’t be afraid when you see her. She’s still your sister. She’s still the same Marcia.”

But I wasn’t.

I looked grotesque. A thick fleshy string connected my upper and lower eyelids. There was a gaping hole underneath my left eye where the skin had been torn away. A red ridge of scar tissue ran the length of my left cheek, with thinner spines spreading out like a spider web toward my nose and ear. A jagged pink scar jutted down from my lower lip toward my chin.

How did they respond to my face? Chuckie was so little, only three. But Cherie was ten, and had seen me on the street, my face torn away. She remembers that Mom told her she would have to help a lot, because I would need a lot of care. But she doesn’t recall being surprised or shocked at how I looked.

“I think I was sad,” Cherie said, “and I was prepared to help with whatever Mom needed.”

A few weeks after I came home, we went shopping downtown.

Mom didn’t often take us downtown. It meant putting Molly into a stroller and tethering Chuck to it with a harness. I was allowed to walk freely, but liked to go off exploring when mom wasn’t looking. That often led to frantic searches and stern scoldings once she found me. But off we went.

We were in Hardy-Herpelsheimers, then the nicest department store in Muskegon. Mom was looking at some dresses and I was uncharacteristically clinging to her. A woman came around one of the displays with her two children and stopped short.

“Oh, my God,” I heard her say. She turned and pulled her children away. “Kids, don’t look at that little girl.”

My mom didn’t say anything, just pulled my head in close to her and held me there, in the middle of the store. We left then, without buying anything, and walked home.

Now that I am a mother, I wonder at her ability to withstand it all. I look at photographs of myself after the accident, and I think, could I have done this? How did she feel, knowing her daughter would be disfigured probably for her entire life? Did she hope I might die and escape the cruelty, the stares, the laughter, the pointing? I can’t imagine. She had pushed the grief from the two lost babies deep within. When she was alone with her thoughts, when she kneeled beside her bed to pray every night, what did she pray for?

I walk on the beaches in Santa Barbara almost every day, watching the tides come in and go out, changing the landscape from one day to the next. Some days the beach is thick with sand stretching from the shoreline to the cliffs. Others the sand is washed away, exposing barnacle-encrusted rocks, sea anemones and an occasional starfish. My Australian shepherd frolics in the waves and plays with the other dogs on the beach. And I think, How is the self built? Like the changing beachscape, we are shaped and formed by forces outside of us. Surely the self is altered by experiences, by perceptions created out of circumstance. What happens to the self if face and body are transfigured by happenstance? If that self is in early formation, a young child of five, the self may be more radically affected. After the accident, my identity evolved into that of a scarred child, a child whose face repulsed people. It wasn’t long before I knew that I was someone to be avoided, that my face was a frightening visage, even for adults. And while I knew my family knew and loved me, I also was certain no one else could possibly see and appreciate the self I was within.

(Part Four)

A Birthday Present

Yesterday was my birthday. Well, it was and it wasn’t. My actual birthday is Christmas Eve, but about seven years ago I decided to celebrate it on July 14 instead. It has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Some people assume it’s just because it is close to Christmas, and that is partially true. When I was a kid, I never had a birthday party outside of just family members partly because of that, and once I was in my early 20s, people started giving me combined birthday and Christmas presents. That never felt good.

But for me, the reasons go much deeper. My Christmas Eve birthday is inextricably linked to my childhood, and very painful memories of innumerable hospitalizations and surgeries. I had no friends before junior high, primarily because the disfiguring scars on my face caused kids to shun me. Abusive Catholic school experiences made going to church difficult, and since we always went to church on Christmas Eve, those memories are equally woven into my Christmastime birthday. It got to be that I could hardly go to Mass without sobbing.

So, I created a new birthday celebration day, one that recognizes who I am today, rather than the sad and lonely disfigured child I was. I have not been that little girl in years, but I carried her around with me until my fifth decade. With lots of counseling – and writing – I was able to let that little girl go, and begin to see myself for the woman I am today – vibrant, happy, inspired, loving, loved.

Friends sometimes tease me about having a “half” birthday or claiming two birthdays a year. And one or two still insist on remembering my Christmas Eve birthday. I love them and appreciate the intent, but I sometimes wish they wouldn’t; it is emotionally painful.

Many of us carry within us what Jung called the “wounded child,” that part of us that was somehow injured in childhood and never recovered from it. It can be emotional or physical, or in my case, both. Often we don’t even know that child is influencing our lives, in ways that oftentimes are destructive.

When my life started to fall apart I was fifty years old, and I couldn’t understand why things weren’t working the way I wanted them to. My marriage was crumbling, my relationship with my mother was puzzling and distant, and I couldn’t seem to make the one professional thing I loved – the Santa Barbara Writers Conference – successful financially. That led to one bad decision after another, until finally, I was forced into bankruptcy. I was despondent, desperate, nearly suicidal.

And yet, through the grace of good therapy and lots of prayer, I began to understand. I started to see how the lessons I learned just to survive had caused me to make choices that ultimately harmed me. I have written about this in my memoir, Face, which was as much a part of the healing as the excellent counseling I received over nearly eight years.

Changing the celebration of my birth allowed me to become the person I am today, without all the woundedness of my childhood. So, thank you, all who have embraced my new life with me. Friends have invited me to lunch and dinner almost every day this week and into next. I cannot express how much you mean to me. You have all literally saved my life, and I am grateful.

Let’s celebrate!

Standing in Gratitude

"Celebrate all that is good and blessed about your life, realizing that gratitude is a powerful remedy." - Caroline Myss

Shoreline Park, Santa Barbara

I was privileged over the weekend to be included in a workshop called The Daring Way, based on the work of Dr. Brene Brown. Brown has written a number of books, among them Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection, and The Power of Vulnerability. She also has given two very powerful TED talks on shame and vulnerability, which prompted me to think deeply about how those two emotional states affect my life.

The workshop was facilitated by Kathryn Downing and her husband, Gerry Flake, who spent several years working with Brown to become certified to teach the course. It was an amazing experience, and I will reflect more in this space on the things I learned in coming weeks and months. The primary take-away for me was that we can choose to live authentically and be vulnerable. The more you can show up and be vulnerable, the less shame you'll feel and the more authentic your life will become. It's a way of living wholeheartedly, and that's what I intend to do.

So, I'm grateful for the time I got to spend with Kathryn and Gerry and the nine others who participated. I'm grateful, too, for my life, and for all of you who are so important to me. (And you know who you are.)

If there's anything I have learned over the past few years, it is that we get to choose what our lives will look like. We can create the life we want. And in the creating we find love, hope, peace, and abundance in all things.

May this day find you in a state of joy and gratitude - for your life, and all the people in it.

Into the Wild - Return to Freedom

On the Central California coast, near a tiny beach called Jalama, is a 300-acre wild horse sanctuary called Return to Freedom. I visited this amazing sanctuary over the weekend with friends, and came away awed and moved by the wild horses that live freely in the hills there, protected for the rest of their lives.

Founded by Neda DeMayo in 1997, the non-profit Return to Freedom supports more than 275 horses in half-a-dozen distinct wild horse bands rescued from government roundups throughout the West.

Despite what many people believe, the American wild horse faces continued threats. Legislation meant to protect these horses has been diluted over the years and government roundups continue. Younger animals are sold, many to brokers who in turn sell them to slaughterhouses in Mexico. Older horses end up spending the rest of their lives in government holding pens. Many die of abuse or starvation. This program costs American taxpayers $100 million a year.

There are other wild horse rescue groups, but Return to Freedom is unique in that it strives to rescue genetically connected or bonded groups of horses. It is also a founding organization of The American Wild Horse Conservancy, which is raising money to buy larger plots of land to protect bands of wild horses for many generations to come.

You can visit Return to Freedom year-round (visit the website for information). The sanctuary also offers an experiential education program, works to change policies related to the wild horse population, and offers youth programs where kids can learn about the horses and volunteer. If you live anywhere nearby, I urge you to visit Return to Freedom. And if you can help support it (hay alone costs more than $30,000 per month), consider making a donation. (They also have an awesome gift shop!)

Special thanks to Connie Weinsoff, Return to Freedom’s director of education and programs, for taking us on an extraordinary and eye-opening tour of the sanctuary.

The Glass is Half Full

I met a man recently. We were chatting amiably, the way two people do who are testing to see if there’s common ground for deeper connection. Asking what the other person does, where they live, where they’ve been, all the usual things. Somehow the question of optimism came up.

I told him I am an optimist by nature. I believe in the inherent goodness of human beings – that evil acts and evil people are aberrations of the human spirit.

He said he, on the other hand, was very much a pessimist.

I asked him why. I’ve never had anyone tell me that before. Of course, I’ve met people I would consider pessimistic, but never someone who so consciously declared it, with no inkling of regret or sadness.

“I’m Jewish,” he said, “and European. I’m inherently pessimistic.”

As a child, he grew up in a city that had been bombed by the Germans to almost nothing. He experienced the travesty of the Holocaust. Also, he explained, Jews do not believe in an afterlife, so what’s the point of hope?

It’s an interesting perspective, one I confess confounded me.

I was raised Catholic. I grew up believing that something wonderful awaited me, if only I hewed to the values and expectations of Christianity. I would be rewarded with Heaven. While I haven’t considered myself a Catholic in many, many years, hope remains strong with me.

As an American, I hold in my cells the call to independence, to adventure, to seeking a better life and believing it’s there, just around the corner. There’s always something glorious waiting – “the shining city on the hill” – my friend said, quoting Ronald Reagan.
Reagan took that phrase from Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop’s exhortation as he sailed toward the colony aboard a ship in 1630. He wrote: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.” (From Life and Letters of John Winthrop, by Robert Winthrop, 1867.)

There have been many references to Winthrop’s “city on a hill” over the years, notably in a speech by Walter Mondale in 1984, and John F. Kennedy cited it in 1961. But it was Reagan’s reference to a “shining city on a hill” in his farewell speech upon leaving office in 1989 that is most remembered today.

Yes, I think my new friend is right: Americans are perhaps ridiculously optimistic. And I agree as well that a Christian influence is at play here. Aren’t we all hoping for some version of the Pearly Gates? But there is something more, a more basic belief system at work.

I couldn’t live without hope. Without knowing that in the end, the basic goodness of humanity will out. Will triumph over evil. Else why would we get up every morning? I have to believe that all will work out in the end. That the good guys will win. It’s not Pollyanna-ish (though I’m sure many would call it that). It’s the only way I could move through the day, could face the hard stuff, accept the disappointments and devastations. I have to believe it will all be okay in the end. It’s how I choose to live. I can’t imagine any other way.

Brené Brown and Daring Greatly

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” - Brené Brown

I'm reading Brené Brown's latest book, Daring Greatly, about finding the courage to be vulnerable. It is a hard thing, especially for someone who has had to be strong most of her life. I'm slowly realizing the gifts of being vulnerable, and part of that is also recognizing that we are enough, just as we are. I am enough.

If you haven't seen Brené's TED talks, they are well worth viewing. There are two; one on vulnerability and one on shame. Watch them both.