SEAT BELTS and SCARS

This story is by Becky Hamlin Pine:

Part I  

In the early fall of 1962, when I was 15, my parents bought their first brand-new car, a dark blue Rambler station wagon for our family of five.  Seat belts were not yet standard equipment in cars in Massachusetts, but their value in saving lives was beginning to be recognized, and they could be purchased as aftermarket items.  On Saturday morning, Dec 22, 1962, I decided to accompany my father when he went to inquire about getting seat belts in our new car.  Several inches of wet snow had fallen early that morning, but by mid-morning, the snow was turning to slush.

Somewhere along the way we rounded a curve, perhaps a bit too fast for the conditions, and began to slide, skidding rapidly into a telephone pole.  I, in the front passenger seat, shattered the windshield with my face. 

My father’s face hit the steering wheel, leaving a small cut on his chin.  He saw the blood on my face and concluded I had a bloody nose. He gave me his handkerchief for the bleeding and helped me lie down in the back seat. Then he went to a nearby house to call our neighbors for some help.  I assessed my situation –I could see, so I knew my eyes were undamaged, but I worried about my teeth, which had been straightened by years of expensive orthodontia.  My father set about trying to dig the car out of the snowbank it was lodged in, perhaps thinking he could drive it home.

Our across-the-street neighbor and his teenage son arrived but quickly recognized that we needed more than a ride home.  They called the police, who took us to the local hospital in what we always called ‘the paddy wagon’.

At the hospital, our family doctor appeared to treat my wounds.  The fact that he happened to be in the hospital on the Saturday morning before Christmas was always seen as miraculous by my parents.  I remember lying on the table as the nurses cleaned up my face to assess the damage.  Our doctor, a family practitioner, gave me novocaine shots in my face which hurt a lot, and then carefully closed the cuts on both of my cheeks with 36 stitches. He covered them with strips of Vaseline-soaked gauze, and sent me home with a supply of replacement Vaseline gauze strips and instructions to not get my face wet.  This meant I could not wash my hair which was now caked with a mix of blood and the soapy water the nurses had used to wash my face.

I spent the rest of the day lying on the couch at home.  My parents were invited to a Christmas party that evening and there seemed no reason for them not to go.  But they were a little uneasy leaving me home with only my younger siblings, so I called my good friend Jonathan, who willingly came over and spent the evening with me, earning a lifelong place in my mother’s heart.

On Monday, Christmas Eve day, with another miracle, my mother was able to get an appointment at a beauty parlor so my hair could be washed without getting my face wet.  Only after this improvement were any photos of my face taken.

Some weeks before, I had accepted an invitation to the Demolay Ball held between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.  I called my date, Donnie, to warn him that I had stitches all across my face, but he still wanted to go to the dance with me, which gained him residence with Jonathan in my mother’s heart.

The stitches were removed (painfully because there was no novocaine for this) before school reopened in January, but the stitching pattern still shone bright red on my face.  One teacher commented about the neat geometry of the doctor’s work.  Many of my classmates expressed concern and asked if I’d been scratched by a cat. 

Over the years, the bright red scars faded, and life moved on.  The new Rambler was repaired and went on to a long and useful life for my family, but the accident lived on in all of our memories. Seat belts became automatic for all of us and mandatory for everyone else in the car. I became a very cautious driver in any amount of snow or ice.  My father never fully lost the guilt he felt over permanently damaging my face. But despite the accident, I felt pretty lucky about my life, and, at age 55, I wrote an essay titled My Lucky Scars which is printed below.

Part II

MY LUCKY SCARS

Becky Hamlin Pine (2002)

It’s a curious experience in our culture to have scars on your face.  Especially fading scars that sort of blend in with the natural lines of your face. They’re right there for everyone to see, but no one ever mentions them, so it’s impossible to know if anyone actually does see them.

There’s no way to casually ask a new acquaintance, “Oh, by the way, do you see the scars on my face?”  It’s sort of like asking your husband if he notices anything different about your hair. Of course, he does now.  But did he before you asked?  He may not know for sure, or he may give the answer he thinks you want to avoid hurting your feelings.

The only person who ever mentions my scars is my father, for whom they carry such a burden of guilt.  He was at the wheel that snow-slushy day forty years ago when the car skidded into a telephone pole, and my face broke the windshield.

Over the years, he’s searched my face carefully and commented about how the lines across my cheeks have faded and become barely visible as if to reassure himself that the damage he caused his oldest child wasn’t so bad after all.

At some point early on, my father took me to a plastic surgeon to see if he could make the scars disappear, but the doctor, whose talent was in camouflaging, not erasing, said he couldn’t.

I didn’t mind.  My scars have truly never bothered me.  Whatever illusions I might have had about being beautiful had long since disappeared in the hothouse climate of high school cliques and popularity contests by the time I acquired this particular distinction at fifteen and a half.  If anything, my scars gave me a brief claim to fame in those first weeks when my classmates asked if I’d been scratched by a cat and my art teacher commented on the symmetry of the thirty-six stitches my doctor had used to close my wounds.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I spend hours in face to face conversation with my clients, probing the painful invisible scars they carry from the past.  I watch emotions play across their faces, like clouds and sunshine over a landscape.  They look back at me intently, wanting validation and fearing judgement, but they almost never ask about my scars.

I brought them up once, as a metaphor for healing, with a client whose father did intentional harm to her far worse than losing control of the car in a snowstorm.  When I asked, she said yes, she had noticed my scars.  But I don’t think she believed what I said about it being possible to heal her old wounds.  In truth I know that the invisible scars left by an abusive parent never fade as well as the once-bright lines on my face have.

For awhile I worked with juvenile delinquent teenaged girls at a residential treatment facility.  Their brazenly blunt inquiries, ‘What happened to your face?”, and their usual assumptions that I’d been ‘sliced’ in a fight bespoke a level of scarring by their life circumstances that had already compromised their development into healthy adults, even if they could manage to avoid future criminal behavior.

It seems ironic to me that few of my friends know how I got these scars.  I have no problem talking about them, but other than the occasional conversation about the importance of wearing seat belts, about which I am passionate, the subject never comes up.  Commenting about an obvious ‘flaw’ on someone’s body is apparently one of our few remaining taboos.

A friend I’d known for years did ask once as we cooled off in the community swimming pool. She’d noticed, she said, that I had scars on my face, but they weren’t visible when I was dressed up at social events.  She wondered what kind of make-up I used to cover them because she had a scar of her own that made her quite self-conscious.  I’m not sure if it was a disappointment or a relief to learn that I never use any make-up and that I had never noticed the scar on her forearm. Apparently evening light and a glass of wine really do blur the lines and soften the edges of life.

As I look at my scars today, I realize how lucky I am.  Lucky, of course, that the windshield shards did not pierce my facial muscles, and that the gashes coincide with my natural smile lines. But more than that.  Lucky to have a life where smiling is my natural state, where the life-changing events have been fortuitous, not damaging.  Lucky to have been born into a family where people feel guilty about causing accidental harm to each other.  And blessed to live in the company of others who know that the surface appearance is only a tiny piece of the essence of a person.