Scars

So I recently fractured my thumb.  It was a ridiculous accident.  I was playing air hockey and, intent on winning, accidentally smacked my thumb on the edge of the table.  That was it.  But as you can see in the xray that little thing caused a small section of bone to fracture off the base of my top thumb bone.  It's a small thing but has been quite debilitating.  Eight weeks on, I still have some pain, some weird nerve stuff, decreased movement.  I'm still in fortnightly physio.  I still can't use it to turn the keys in the ignition.

And although I was somewhat surprised that I'd managed to break it so easily, that wasn't the biggest surprise for me in this xray.  I have circled the interesting thing.  Another fracture.  A fracture that has healed very well over time and causes me no problems.  But I never had an xray when that fracture happened.  I know it didn't happen in my adulthood as I've been damned good at having things xrayed when I've suspected injury.  And being someone who isn't super coordinated there have been a few.  But this is the first one I've taken the time to look at myself.

I remember how this fracture happened.  At least I'm pretty sure this is how it happened.  Unless it happened when I was very small where my memories are patchy.  I'm pretty sure it happened the only time I can remember thinking I'd broken my finger.

It was after school.  A girl a few years younger than me asked me to help her regarding someone who was bullying her (her brother).  So I had a chat with him in the classroom.  The chairs had been put up on the tables ready for the cleaner.  He threw one at me*.  I put my hands up to protect my face and it hit my right hand.  My finger hurt and had a lump sticking out the side.  Not wanting him to see that it hurt, I didn't cry.  Instead, I pointed my weird looking finger at him and chased him.  He ran away.

Now I know this happened.  I remember this happening.  But I never told my parents that this happened.  I may have taped them together myself - it seems like something a 12 year old me might have done - but maybe I didn't.  Maybe I didn't want to draw attention to my injury.  Whatever I did I didn't tell a single adult about what had happened.  I didn't seek medical help.  I just kept on trucking.

Here's me dressed up for Halloween aged 9ish
in our kitchen in South Head              

This probably seems crazy to most people so I'm going to break it down into two parts.  This is the first part.  It's the easy and logical part - the believable part.  And that part is that we were poor.  We mostly lived in very isolated places - at times more than an hour from even a dairy or petrol station.  We hardly ever sought medical support because we simply could not go.  We could not afford the petrol to get there let alone the medical fees.  Since he was little my brother has been prone to skin infections**.  At one point he had some awful ones on his back.  Dad lanced them with a hot poker in our dining room.  I once got a 2cmish piece of bark stuck in my foot from running the inter-school cross-country barefoot.  I had seen the medic at the event and they had diagnosed a cut filled with dirt and put a sticking plaster on it.  Back home, Dad cut open my foot to extract the bark.  It hurt like hell.  While home surgery was generally as sterile as home surgery can get, it was never accompanied by pain relief.

Now this is the second part.  This is the hard part, the part I've always struggled to talk about in a way it can be made sense of because we're discouraged to talk about these things.  This part is that I was afraid.  I was afraid that if I told my parents what had happened I would get in trouble for 'fighting'.  As a girl in an at times*** extremist Christian household, this kind of behaviour was certainly not deemed to be ladylike.  And I was afraid of creating another problem in a home that already had enough problems.  And I felt this way because I lived with someone who gave me good reason to be afraid.

This is hard to write.  Even harder to publish hence the revisit since the first draft about five months ago.  It's hard because I have always tried to protect the people that were part of my childhood, that are still living and still part of my life.  But I know this silence is exactly what perpetuates family violence issues.  And in Aotearoa, family violence is a big problem and big reality for many of us.  Here, in about half of all homicides the offender is a family member.  And one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence perpetrated by an intimate partner.  There's plenty more awful stats which you can read for yourself here.  And while some people are not safely positioned to talk about what's happened, I am hoping I am not one of those people.  As such, I feel it's important I try and articulate aspects of my experience so that those not living with family violence can gain some kind of understanding.  And so that those living with it feel less alone.

The second part is that I was afraid of my Dad.  Growing up, my home was not a safe space to be injured in, not a safe place to be sick in and definitely not a safe space to speak up or disagree.

When I was about eleven he beat our puppy so badly he broke its leg.  He beat it because it was howling at night.  Because it had been put outside alone in the kennel.  Because it was not used to sleeping alone because it was just a baby not long weaned from its mother.  And in the morning when he realised how badly he'd injured it, he shot it.  He put it out of it's misery.  He never said this, but I'm sure it was because he was ashamed of what he'd done.  He told us it was because we couldn't afford to take it to the vet.  This was equally true.

I was afraid of my father because his behaviour was erratic.  Because sometimes he could be patient.  Because sometimes he answered my questions about the world as honestly as he could.  But other times I was expected to maintain complete silence - to be seen and not heard.  Because he taught me that a woman's place was in the home, but I was still expected to go and work on the farm.  And once, when I questioned this imbalance regarding washing dishes, he threw his cutlery at me.

I was afraid of my father because he threatened us.  He threatened to take my brother and I away from our mother to Australia.  Sometimes he threatened to kill my mother.  He threatened to kill us all and himself afterward.  I was small when he first said these things - but he was still saying them when I was fourteen years old, and I still believed him.  I was afraid of my father because he was so charismatic that many, many people in our local community sang his praises.  Because my mother voluntarily went back to him after fighting so hard to get away.  Because I didn't understand what this magical power he had was, and why it seemed to work on everyone but me.  Because I knew if I told, no-one would believe me.  Growing up, I felt afraid and very, very alone.
          

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My thumb is completely healed now.  Sometimes it hurts a bit, but by 12 weeks my flexibility and strength were basically as good as new.  The finger that I broke also healed completely fine.  On the xray I can see it has healed in place with the slight calcification on the outside you'd expect from a simple fracture.

I'm not missing that giant thumb splint!

I have told the story of how I broke my thumb to countless people - customers at work, friends, whanau, people on the street.  I had never told anyone how I broke my finger until I checked in with Mum before writing this post.  Bones can knit.  And muscles can regain their lost capacity.  Through physio.  Through witnessing progress in movement, through gaining strength as time passes.

When we don't talk about our other scars, we don't allow them to heal cleanly.

We all have scars.  Whether physical or emotional we all have them.  Our lives, and the lives of those who shape us, are imperfect and we cannot change our past.  For those of us who have scars like mine, scars that impact how our synapses form as toddlers, scars that change us markedly from our unscathed peers, it is so important that we talk about them.  That we acknowledge that pain and loss.  That we treat them more like we would a fracture, we diagnose, triage and physio them.

And hopefully by talking about our scars, we can prevent future injuries.

* This incident doesn't even rank in the worst bullying/physically violent things that happened to me whilst at school.

** He still is.  He can literally scrape his knuckles on something and it'll be red and infected with lines going up his arm the next day.

*** I am very certain that Dad had undiagnosed bipolar.  While he had grown up in a Christian household, we were not a church going, Bible thumping family.  He would go off on religious benders.  At those times, simple things like me cutting my hair into a short bob were considered major breaches.  I was 'unfeminine' and short hair on a woman 'went against God'.  He wasn't like this all the time.  Religious mania or Messiah complex are commonly experienced during bipolar episodes.

On the whole Dr Seuss Thing

So this Tuesday Dr Seuss Enterprises stated that they would no longer be printing six of his books.

And the world seems to have lost its mind.

A tiny part of me gets it.  I grew up with Dr Seuss.  My kids are growing up with Dr Seuss.  I do not think he's a total hero - his books are super gendered and have little female representation.  But his books are good at teaching kids literacy in a fun way.  It is hard to envisage a world without Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat or Fox in Socks (my favourite).  And we don't need to.  Because none of these books made the list.  This is the out-of-print list:

And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937)  
McElligot's Pool (1947)
If I Ran The Zoo (1950)
Scrambled Eggs Super (1953)
On Beyond Zebra (1955)
The Cat's Quizzer (1976)

While I've read some of the books on that list, none of them are books I'd consider 'Classic Seuss'.  Seriously, when did you last sit down and think 'Hmmm, I really need to buy McElligot's Pool for my kids.'*  Or 'Man I miss reading On Beyond Zebra, I wonder if it's at Whitcoulls?'  Sure, it's a shame the first kids book he got published no longer will be.  But this is small fish compared to the reasons not to.

The reasons for not continuing to print these books is because they contain racist imagery**.  That's it.  As quoted directly from the statement from Dr Seuss Enterprises:

'These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.'

Because at it stands, the magic of Seuss is for white kids.

Having a relationship with an author that not only excludes you but actively makes fun of your heritage is complicated.  It's easy to love Seuss if you're white.  Even easier if your male.  It's easy to shrug these few books off as 'whoopsies'.  It's a lot harder if you're not.  If you're not, his is just another racist voice in the crowd.  Even if you love some of his books, how do you feel comfortable reading books by  someone who creates racist imagery?  Especially in a world that already treats you differently.  The discontinuation of publishing these books is an effort to make the rest of Dr Seuss's catalogue more accessible to more people.  And while this cannot rectify the issues caused by them being published in the first place, it is at least an effort to acknowledge this issue.

One of his cartoons depicting Hirohito

And honestly, I think Dr Seuss would have applauded it.

Before he was spitting rhymes in kids books Geisel was a political cartoonist.  He drew over 400 cartoons for the New York Newspaper between 1941 and 1943 .  Many of these had racist content - particularly aimed at the Japanese.  He was a product of his times.  Pearl Harbour was bombed in December 1941.  I am not justifying his actions, but I understand that this was essentially his job.  Much of the US lived in fear of what their future held, and fear is a big driver of prejudice.

 
But at his heart, Theodor Seuss Geisel was a liberal and a moralist.  Many of his books convey liberal messages - The Sneetches is a critique of anti-Semitism.  The Butter Battle Book conveys the dangers (and futility) of the arms race.  And Horton Hears A Who! is about listening, and helping uplift the powerless.  Geisel passed away in 1991.  He never witnessed the LA riots of 1992.  He never saw the rise in Islamophobia following September 11.  And he never heard about the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer in 2020.  If he had, I really don't think he would have backed the racist imagery a younger Seuss had drawn.

Because around the same time he was drawing these awful cartoons he was also drawing these:

He understood the dangers of prejudice.  He was concerned about how they were affecting things at home in the US.  And as he got older, his books became more inclusive.  Of the more than 50 books he published from 1954 onward - only one of those books made the list.  Geisel made an effort to change with the times.  His books addressed not just issues from earlier times, but climate change, political freedom, and the importance of creativity in an ordered world.

But I think the reason we value Seuss so highly is because of how successfully he has shared his love of words.  The Cat In The Hat was written as a response to the debate about early literacy in America.  He wrote it in an effort to rid the world of Dick and Jane and the terribly boring world they occupied.  And in doing so he introduced fun and colour and rhyme which helped to engage young readers.

So if you're one of those people who is upset about this I want you to really consider what it is you're upset about.  What have you lost?  Are you really upset that these books are no longer being published - that they will be harder to get?  I honestly think this is about fear.  Fear of a changing world.  Fear of a world that looks different to the world many of us grew up in.  And it's so important to remember that fear is a dangerous thing.   Fear was used by Hitler back in the 1930's to engage the masses.  Fear was used by Donald Trump in recent times to do the same thing.  Fear is the food of racism.  Fear is the starter of wars.  But fear also halts progress, it maintains the current hegemony.

If we want this world to be more accessible, if we want people to have equal opportunities we need to acknowledge the mistakes of our past.  We need to accept that while change is scary, it is necessary for us to move toward a more balanced world.  This is a small change.  Real change requires much more.  And in the famous words of Dr Seuss himself:

* And I seriously wouldn't.  Not just because of the racist imagery, but that book is super creepy.  I think that as a child it was the second most scary Dr Seuss book I ever read (the scariest was definitely What Was I Scared Of.  The third scariest was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins).

** I do not need to repost those images here.  You can look them up for yourself if you want.