Mirror, mirror on the face!!!

I had a surreal experience during the weekend. The experience brought a scene back to me…a scene from many many years ago!

You know how it is… you can live your daily routine of life, go to your work and talk to people, respond very intelligent responses, cook, eat, do the laundry, play, laugh, even cry…and still somewhere deep in your brain or heart or subconscious or where ever it is (!!!), something is playing over and over like a broken record.

But let me take few steps back….

Have you read Demian from Hess? One of my very favorite authors….
There is a paragraph in that book:

“The things we see are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life…”

Well, sometimes something is so deeply rooted in our psyche that years and years will pass and we do not even know about it…and one day something happens and BOOM! You will be hit with the memories, sensations and what they represented to you ALL YOUR LIFE!

Saturday night, my little boss was running…as usual full force, not really paying attention to any obstacle on his way…more like: “Oh you are there…I am sure by the second that I reach you, you will disappear or I become Hercules and take care of you somehow”…I swear, I sometimes have to close my eyes to save myself from heart attacks that I might get just by sheer panic of “WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF….”

Anyway, the little man was running full force. Somehow the prospect of bed time charged his battery more than usual and in his P.J. he was chatting and running from one room to the next and his path was so close to our stair case with its wooden carved rail…so obviously it is not his problem that the wooden rail is there or if he hits that, it might hurt him!!!!!!!!!!!

As I am walking toward him to somehow calm him down for “nighty night”, I just saw the whole thing in slow motion…he hit the side of his head and face to the rail while he was running in my direction full force…He screamed, ran into my arms…I kneeled down and was trying to sooth him from one hand and assess the trauma from the other hand…

Well he had a little red bump that would become a bruise in few minutes…nothing that a dose of good old Arnica could have not helped…I started to instruct my better half to hold him and put some gentle pressure and ice on the site of the accident while I went downstairs to bring Arnica (and by this time little boss forgot all about the “boo boo” and was more annoyed that why we are not allowing him to run or play…)…

I was walking downstairs that it all hit me…I almost got buried under the avalanche of a memory…Me being 13 years old, the parking door bounced back and hit my head with full force…I could not see anything because of the blood flow running down into my eyes, the shock numbed my system so much that I did not feel any pain and yet I saw my parents kneeling in front of me…their faces were HORRIFIED…their faces were so unbelievably shocked and scared as if they were looking at the most scary scene ever….those pairs of horrified eyes brought me out of my shock and I screamed “I want a mirror!”…

Think about it: I recall so well that I did not feel any pain at that moment, but I was so scared of what I might see in the mirror…well I ran to the car to use its mirror and I was shocked. My face was all blood and the only thing I could see was the open wound in the middle of my eyebrow…the rest is just foggy memory of my parents rushed me to the hospital and I do not remember a single memory after that…Oh but I do recall my sensation: “I look terrible, I look deformed!”…

I am not sure was this because of my parents shocking faces at that first moment that they looked at me or because I looked at the mirror or for any other reason…well the wound healed, I have a scar in the middle of my eyebrow that with passing of years it is truly much less visible and with minimum make up it is totally invisible…but in reality it took 19-20 years in order for the scar to become invisible to MY EYES. I don’t think of it or feel it anymore…

I think my perception of being beautiful changed that night. I was always being told that I was a beautiful baby and a stunning girl. At age 13 while puberty starts to show its sign with awkward facial features and body growth, I still remember being praised a lot for my beauty. But after that night, whenever I heard someone telling me I was beautiful, I would feel utterly disconnected from those words. They were shallow words with absolutely no meaning for me. The words did not make me sad or happy…they were just white noises.

The reality was that I never felt beautiful from that year on. The only time that I felt totally and absolutely beautiful was on my wedding day. I was truly a stunning bride, everyone said that and more important than that I felt it so deep. I did not need to hear others or look in the mirror to know how gorgeous I looked. There was nothing wrong with my face, makeup, hair and my smile!

I remember after the wound healed properly one day my mother gave me my very first piece of make up equipment: an eyebrow pencil. She showed me what I can do with it. I mean for a person like me that really is not into make up – and do not have patience or any interest for it what so ever (I talked about it in one of my earlier posts) - that eyebrow pencil became part of necessity….

My mother and I never talked about it after, until couple of years ago. By that time I really did not have an ugly perception of my wound. A subject came up and I brought the story of my first eyebrow pencil to my mother’s attention. She looked at me with sad eyes and told me she was so afraid that people might tease me and this is why she thought the best way is to show me how to hide it.

We do the best we can in situations. Those “best” come from our own perceptions…but still it is the best, especially if there is a noble intention behind it. I now believe it with all my heart.

But I wondered so many times that the alteration in my perception happened because of those shocking, horrified faces in front of me…or was there any other reason? The story could have unfolded another way and I might have been teased or not…and if I would have been teased, I might have taken it to heart or not…well we never know, would we?!

The memory showed its face exactly the moment that little boss hit the wooden rail…But this time it was not the memory of the sensation of being ugly or deformed. It was the memory of a parent’s eyes…

I am a parent now. Accidents will happen…we all know that whether we are parents or not…mothers will skip heartbeats with every wound and scratch…and now I am so aware of my face, the face that will look into his eyes when he has a pain…he will look into my eyes and use them as a mirror and this mirror will tell him so much… He will ask this mirror consciously or subconsciously: “mirror mirror on the FACE…” and this mirror can change his perception for a very very long time…..sometimes for a life time…