Icy Hard

I was sitting at the table, reading a bit, drinking a cup of hot apple cider vinegar and honey. I had recently gotten back from my job cleaning the church. I had spent a fair amount of time, halfway through vacuuming the sanctuary, sitting at the piano and working on our anthem for this Sunday. I plunked out the alto part with my right index finger and thumb as I worked through the measures I hadn't quite learned yet. It is a lovely acapella piece by someone named Zingarelli, sung in 4 parts. I hadn't gone to choir practice this week, as that was one of my days from hell. This was a very hard week for me emotionally. My daughter worried me almost constantly with her behavior, and I have some scary financial problems. By the time Thursday night rolled around, I was feeling angry and sad and tired and resentful. Feeling like everyone just wants a piece of me, that no one cares about my needs but only about what I could do for them. Still fast in the flush of PTSD flashbacks--the pure emotional kind--because actually no one was really doing that to me, and that if I had reached out for help, friends would have helped me.

Anyway, I haven't been singing at all since I have been feeling so bad, and I didn't warm up before working on the Zingarelli. My throat was feeling rough when I got home, and nothing works better than the cider vinegar and honey. I usually drink a cup or two every day in the colder weather to help my throat. I was enjoying the relief of the hot drink and reading a bit of Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shoutin". He was talking about his mean, damaged, alcoholic father, and suddenly a harsh memory rose up in my mind like a scary monster surfacing from black waters.

I want to say first that I do not enjoy emotional pain, though I am accustomed to it. Sometimes it is so familiar I do not actually realize I am in the midst of it, and I think sometimes I actually look for it, unconsciously. Because, for obvious reasons, it became a familiar state of being and if I wasn't in it, then where was I? As I get healther, by degrees, I recognize it better and protect myself from it more. I think part of that is I still do not completely trust feeling peaceful, as if something will surely come along and shatter that peace, so if I am already in pain, I am ready for anything, right? It is exhausting, to say the least. However, emotional pain has an edge to it that I would not call enjoyable exactly, but that can be somehow addictive, and I think that I am not alone in seeking it out sometimes. I think many people in our wacked out culture seek it too, in all kinds of ways. I am somewhat ashamed by my own participation in that, but, in this instance, I wasn't looking for it. Or maybe I was: Bragg's memoir is full of pain but written, crafted, so beautifully, and with such a fine sense of dark humor that he and I are kin of a sort, having been raised in a similar wasteland. Reading another survivor's memories can help make sense of something that felt largely senseless at the time, for me anyway, and so transforms--redeems?--something ugly into something beautiful. It also creates a sense of connection, of not having suffered alone. A function of art. Anyway, I digress hugely. Forgive me. This memory, one I haven't thought of in a very long time, demanded my attention, and now I have to tell it, hopefully to put it to rest as best I can.

We had had a lot of snow. My daughter was 3 or 4 and she had the cutest little pink snowsuit. She was (is) such a beautiful child, and her joy in life was a pure and wonderful thing. She was like a happy songbird, chattering away in her little girl language. We were all outside, the X and I shovelling the most recent snowfall from the driveway, a wide expanse that sloped steeply up to the road. It was a lot of work. There were really high piles of snow packed in on the sides of the road, pushed there by the plow, and we had had to dig through that first before we could begin to throw up snow onto it. I remember the sight of my daughter as a brilliant spot of vibrant pink in a very white world. What I don't remember is what set off the X, but suddenly we were arguing and he shoved me out into the road and grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved my face into the snowbank. He crushed my face into the icy hardness and held it there. I remember the sound of my daughter sobbing and screaming and trying to catch her own breath as I thought to myself, 'This time I am going to die. I am really going to die."

But I didn't die. I got really scared and couldn't breathe and flailed in panic, but I did not die. He finally let me go, and I gasped for breath like someone surfacing from deep water and I staggered over to my terrified little daughter. As I picked her up and held her close and rocked her slowly back and forth, making quiet, soothing sounds, he said to me, "Look what you did to her."

No, he didn't say it, he spit out the words, contemptuous and hard, bloody broken teeth, shards of dirty ice, huge crystals of bitter rock salt. I stood there stunned by what he had just said, not to mention reeling from what he had just did, holding my little one in my arms, and you can be sure I was crying too. He turned away from both of us as if we were too disgusting for words, and he went into the house. By the time I got up my courage to go in too, he acted like nothing unusual had happened.

I wish I was making this up. And maybe you can see, that when my daughter's behavior worries me now, I can't help but think about then.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai