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I’ll Show You Mind if You Show Me Yours
by Satia Renee
Janice invited me to write something for her blog, something about the time I left home and lived for the summer from friend-to-friend, sometimes sleeping in a park, often wandering the streets all night long because sleeping during the day is safer. She wanted me to write about how I ended up leaving home and I just can’t seem to do it.
Forget for a moment that she remembered the name of the place (Project 21) where I lived in a shelter with other homeless teenagers and I had no recollection of what it was called although I can envision the stoop of the building and the pink and red walls of the room I shared with two other girls.
Pink and red like the inside of Jeannie’s bottle which, when I was a little girl, was how I wanted my bedroom to be painted but now, as a teenager, could see why it was not a comfortable choice for day-to-day living.
But the thing is, I don’t want to write about my wounds. I want to poke out my arm and say “Look. See? How this scar here has colors like pearls, iridescent pink and cream, a little weave of violet and this white seamless tissue. See how beautiful this scar has become over time? How it puckers around the edges with lines like lips ready to be kissed.
Or lips sucking on a lemon, I suppose, could also be an adequate metaphor because I can’t deny the scars are not there by accident and my mother likes to think I spent every night in someone’s home but never asks herself how I ended up living in a shelter.
Believe me, if I had to choose between a shelter or a friend’s home, I was going to choose a friend’s home every day but as winter approached (and it would have been sooner except for the remarkably mild summer we had that year) I had to get off the streets somehow.
By the time I did, I weighed less than 90 lbs and had pneumonia.
Sure there are stories to tell about why I left but it really boils down to a single scene in The Breakfast Club when Emelio Estevez’ character is trying to make sense of why Ally Sheedy is packed and ready to run off and she says about her family, “They ignore me.”
That’s how it felt, anyway. And at the time it was enough to drive me away. Away from home and my mother. Away from her hopes and aspirations for me. Because now it was my turn to ignore her and everything she loved me enough to believe was possible for me. And I ignored her with a vengeance.
See? Here? More scars.
My son and I were lying together by the pool. His siblings were still splashing around and he was cuddled under a towel, small enough to be fully cocooned, while I read a book. With one long finger he was tracing a pattern on my thigh and he asked me, “Mommy, when will I have pearls in my skin too?”
He was tracing the stretchmarks, those post-pregnancy scars, that mottled my skin and I smiled and said, “Give it time. We all end up with scars.”
So I could tell you where I’ve been, show you these scars, because there are so many. Or I can tell you where I am, not necessarily denying how I got here but appreciating that there are more wounds on my horizon and, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to carry more scars with grace. In the meantime, my mother and I have been playing phone tag. We’re not ignoring one another anymore. We just have a fundamental (and I think genetic) proclivity for lousy timing.
Obviously we’ve come a long way, the two of us, and I know this because . . . well, you know how sometimes you hear your mother’s voice or words coming out of your mouth and you cringe inside, maybe even shudder a little in horror? When I hear my mother’s voice coming out of my own mouth, I smile.
(Satia Renee is a writer, poet, and editor based in Georgia. Her blog is *highly* recommended for avid readers, who will find extensive book reviews and quotes.)