Skin Game: A Memoir (20 page)

Authors: Caroline Kettlewell

BOOK: Skin Game: A Memoir

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I couldn’t imagine myself like every other newly minted mother I’d seen, with my baby slung easily on an outthrust hip. I couldn’t imagine myself pushing some as-yet-unrealized somebody on a swing or snapping photos of birthdays or saying mom things like “Don’t track those muddy shoes all over my kitchen.” Mothers were other people, grown-ups, women who could keep track of shots and shoes and play dates. I went through my entire pregnancy feeling I was trying to pull off a sham, pretending to the part of the ethereal madonna when I was wholly unqualified for the job.

And yet. When my son was born, into the waiting shelter of my arms, it was though the shape and structure of me had been made precisely to the purpose of fitting him. I was shocked by the fierce and immediate entanglement of this bond, that my son should become to me like a chamber of my heart.

* * *

I brought him into this world, made him up from scratch and delivered him into this troubled and troubling world, so that someday, like all of the rest of us, he will suffer loss and grief and doubt. It is my responsibility, therefore, to believe that something else is possible as well. I have to believe that life will also offer him its gestures of grace.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to have the big epiphany: some climactic confrontation, a couple of weepy scenes, and then the tidy wrap-up, the denouement. Maybe I throw in a few twelve-step-meeting interludes where I tell you about Pam (not her real name) who is a striking blonde, an executive at a Fortune 500 company, who confesses to the group that on weekends she inscribes her Fortune 500 flesh with a box-cutter. Then I tell you how I’m in recovery, one day at a time.

I don’t have a tidy narrative conclusion to offer. When I finally stopped cutting, there was no specific day I could mark for this turn, no moment of epiphany when everything became suddenly clear to me and I forsook the razor forever. Instead, the end came as a series of unconnected moments assembling themselves into a whole that is evident only in retrospect.

I started cutting because at a particular point in my life I ran afoul of a certain unique set of circumstances for which neither experience nor my own emotional constitution had equipped me. I can’t say what precise conjunction of factors led me to choose self-mutilation as my recourse, nor can I say how my life might have been different if any one of these factors had been otherwise. All I can say is that my skin itself seemed to cry out for an absolution in blood.

I kept cutting, because it worked. When I cut, I felt better for a while. When I cut, my life no longer overwhelmed me. I felt too keenly the threat of chaos, of how things can get away from you in a thousand ways. Bodies expand, grades plummet, pets die, paint peels, ice caps melt, genocide erupts. Entropy keeps eating at the ramparts, and I cut to try to shore them up. I cut to lay down a line between before and after, between self and other, chaos and clarity. I cut as an affirmation of hope, saying,
I have drawn the line and I am still on this side of it.

There’s no explaining that by reason or logic, any more than you can measure grief with a mathematical equation or formulate memory in a test tube. Sometimes the mind just has its own ideas.

When I stopped cutting, it was only because I could afford to, because my need for it had apparently run its natural course, like the fever the body mounts to fight off an infection, that subsides when the danger is past. There are self-mutilators whose stories are much harder than mine; their wounds are much deeper, and their bodies look like the scarred-over field of a battle. Sometimes, after years of fighting, they end up losing the war. But if you make it to your thirties, suggests the assembled evidence on self-mutilation, then chances are good you’ll have fought all the way through to some kind of truce, some resolution. You have the benefit of the simple luxury of time and perspective.

I could look back over the evidence of more than twenty years, marked in dozens of scars—some dark, some pale, some ribbed by the patch job of tissue that reconnected the severed fabric of my flesh, some almost too faint to announce themselves except as the most infinitesimal of breaks in the crosshatched pattern of my skin. How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think,
Maybe I don’t need this anymore.
Maybe I never did.

I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to.

Stopping, however, was not at all the same thing as ending the desire. Even now, I still sometimes ache with a fierce, organic need for cutting’s seductive, minimalist simplicity. I expect that I will always be the kind of person who is too much aware of the boundlessness of chaos; it’s like having an unfortunate sixth sense, alive to the teeming, invisible undercurrents of anarchy streaming past us at every moment. I don’t say it makes me stronger, or more interesting, or gives me character; it’s just a part of my fabric of self. Most days it makes me yearn at least once, and on the bad days almost constantly, for a leave of absence from my own life any way I can get it. But you get older, and you see that you have choices, and you see that you’re only going to have this one life, and it’s up to you whether you want to seize hold of it or leave it forever waiting in unclaimed baggage. If I could have understood this point earlier, maybe it would have saved me a lot of grief. Maybe, on the other hand, you have to make your journey, and bear its scars.

When I was planning for the birth of my son, I got one piece of advice about labor that stood me in greatest stead: A woman told me that the key is to focus on the contraction you’re in, and not to think about the ones yet to come. That’s what I’m trying to do with my life, to confront what faces me now, and recognize that I cannot know what else might come until it gets here. I try to understand that all we ever have at our disposal is the present, and in the present I can choose either to cut or not to cut.

Choosing not to cut has meant that instead I have had to sit there with the awful agony of unhappiness when it comes—with loneliness, loss, anger, regret, disappointment—and gut it through. The first few times, when I had a fight with my husband, when my cat died, when free-range anxiety swallowed me up whole, it was like having unanesthetized surgery. I had to keep screaming to myself above the shrieking of my distress,
THIS WILL NOT KILL YOU!

Each time, I expected the looming offstage dread I’d been running from all my life to reveal itself at last, and bring the world down in pieces. To my surprise, instead, the terrible feelings would eventually, at last, come to an end, and I would find myself still intact. Maybe shaken and bruised a little, but still in one piece. I’d glance around almost amazed at life resuming its stride, as though I were crawling out of the storm cellar after a tornado to discover quite unanticipatedly that the house is still standing.

In that complex interplay of experience and physiology, I like to think that every time I gut it through and survive, I’m reshaping the structure and the chemistry of my thoughts, wearing new paths less tortured and convoluted than the old ones. Every new crisis successfully negotiated and survived inches me that much farther from the event horizon of despair.

I have drawn the line, and I am still on this side of it.

I would like to thank Sharon Brooks for generously granting me the time to write; Susan Shreve for many years of encouragement; my agent, Jennie Dunham, for her vision and invaluable advice; my editor, Reagan Arthur, for her patience and editorial guidance; Leslie Shiel; Wendi Kaufman; Joe and Lee Sites; my parents and extended family for all their support; and most of all my husband, for everything.

SKIN GAME. Copyright © 1999 by Caroline Kettlewell. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kettlewell, Caroline.