When pain looks like love, how do you know the difference?
No Artificial Coke (2016) by Clara Hallencreutz
The Poem of the Day was Having a Fight with You. I click.
is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV
My heart starts to race. I know those feelings—of not being able to breathe, not being able to move. In the corner of my bedroom on the floor while my mom stood over me, hitting me. Or trapped and naked on my dad’s lap while his hand spanked and slapped.
It’s like waking with scalpels
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.
I have to stop. Why don’t I look away?
In 1983, I routinely skipped class and listened to Every Breath You Take. One kid said, “That guy’s a stalker. The lyrics are creepy.”
I thought it would be nice for someone to care that much.
I didn’t have friends that year, so it took until 1983 for people to notice that the police removed me from my parents’ home.
Having a fight with you
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper
that says you never loved me—
I have to tell myself I didn’t write that stanza. I am not in a fight now. I can step back and breathe.
But when I try to step back, I have to admit something I don’t want to say, because I’m so old, and I think you’ll think: It’s so sad that she still cares about this, why can’t she just move on?
Now that I have my own children, it’s incredible to think this is possible, but I know it’s true that my mother never loved me.
my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.
One morning I woke up hoping it would be the day my mom started talking to me. She was on her second week of silent treatment. I remember watching her walk into the bathroom and sit on the toilet. She didn’t shut the door and didn’t look at me.
After school, after it got dark, I waited in the foyer for my dad to come home. I greeted him with a huge, loud excited hug, happy to have someone to talk to. But my hands were dirty, and he said, “You ruined my shirt!” He whipped off his suit jacket, tackled me and straddled my body to pin my legs.
That’s when Mom’s silent treatment stopped.
“Stop! David! Stop!” I don’t remember this, but I heard her tell this story many times to show people that there was a time she stopped him from beating me. “He would have killed you,” is what she says every time she tells the story. She says she saved my life.
I come back to this poem when I want to feel tight in my tummy, dizzy in my head. This time I have a pain in my ear and I’m not sure why. Wait. I just remembered the last time I went to school with a note from my dad. It said, “Please excuse the last two days of absence. She was sick.”
My teacher looked at the note and then looked at me. “Is there anything besides the black eye?”
“Yeah, my ear hurts.”
“Did your dad do that to you?”
Oh. Wait. What? “How do you know to ask that?”
Thirty years later, when I asked one of my high school friends if she knew, she couldn’t believe I was asking: “The debate coach took you out of school to buy you clothes. No one was hiding anything.”
I don’t keep the poem on my phone. I make myself search for it so I have extra seconds to prepare for a chance to feel that ear. I couldn’t feel it then, there was so much going on. So I want to feel it now, to sit right back in 1983 and feel my ear throbbing, my bottom stinging like sunburn from my dad’s spanking.
Because it’s hard to believe that it happened. I had to work so hard to not let it bother me. Now I have to go back and be bothered. And I’m so bothered that I feel hopeless. How will I one day stop coming back to this poem? Will I come one day and read those first words without feeling smothered by my mother’s hate?
On a lark, I read Poem-a-Day where Patrick Phillips describes his poem Having a Fight with You as a reply to the poem Having a Coke with You by Frank O’Hara.
What.
O’Hara’s poem is a sweet, funny, loving moment—two men being in love. And Phillips’ poem is the reply? The other side of love? Phillips says his poem is about how the intensity of falling love is just like the intensity of pain in a fight. But I can’t imagine having the fight and love at the same time. And if I had love like those two guys having a Coke, I don’t think I’d survive the disappointment and pain that comes from fighting. I wouldn’t trust that love comes with fighting because I’ve never seen it.
But knowing the connection between the poems gives me hope. If I can feel this much pain, then maybe I can feel that much love.
This is stunning in its honesty. The sensation that is coming back into your body. Your grit and power at facing this. Keep breathing. Keep facing the pain. I’m so sorry for the love you didn’t receive. I wasn’t sexually abused by my dad … but I still remember the spanking. At least occasionally with a brush, with a belt. I used to pee myself. I couldn’t help it. He would sit me down on the toilet to pee before he beat (oh, wait, “spanked”) me, but I couldn’t then. Instead, I would pee all over him as soon as he started smacking me.
Maybe I was fighting back.
Something I’ve been trying hard to do is work in detail. I remember this from the World Trade Center recovery groups that the leaders would always push I to get more detail and detail because if you can organize the details and say them in a way that makes sense, you have the power over the details. So, anyway, this is me appreciating the detail you share. We each have to work hard to get there.
I’m with Wenda. Usually I can’t get past abuse bits, due to my own. But if P’s brave enough to write us in there, we can strive to ride it out. Kindly, P.
Thank you, Paul. That means a lot. But also, if you don’t read all the way though, how will I know if I have any copy errors?!?!
Great point! I had to bail on 2 posts this year. They may be riddled. Perhaps I can harness the greater good of proofing. To chair us through despair. :)
“Because it’s hard to believe that it happened. I had to work so hard to not let it bother me. Now I have to go back and be bothered.”
Dang Penelope, good line!
Once you feel the pain and process it (emdr) it stops. It becomes like a bruise or a phantom limb. I have moments when I stop and am like- “huh. I use to be like that.” And it feels like maybe I should still but now I have a choice. And I choose not to.
All the pain is like a dark tunnel and there is a small, small light that refuses to be snuffed out. And as you feel the pain the light grows brighter. And then one day- it’s only the light with a small amount of dark.
But it’s freaking trauma- and it will always be there.
I read this and I cried . For you. First, for you. How awful, to have to hold all that. But also that now it must be dug back up and addressed. I don’t know why. But the unhealed parts we live with today, their resolution lies in being able to see it from this vantage point. Things I have known forever about myself, these same things, unearthed , are changing me. For the better.
I never thought I would know so intimately, the pain of partner abuse. Of how it feels when warmth turns to withholding. When silence means war , instead of pervading peace. When the love you thought you waited for, all of your life, alternates between grief and confusion.
I have been reading you for years, Penelope. You have been through so much. You should write a book about your life, because you are good with words. Because you can bring the reader to tears and make them feel things. But today you touched me personally. This thing about abuse. How it holds me in the grip of it. Wanting to go back to him. For that one last sweetness, which will inevitably be followed by a subtle insult. You cannot go to the same source of harm and find the healer in it. Unless you are enlightened. Which I am not.
If love hurts, it isn’t love. I know that. I also know I will never choose this for myself again. I also feel lucky. Do you feel lucky, Penelope? I wonder. I know my next man will be my last man and that he will be the right collection of attributes. He will fit into my world. I am wishing you the best Penelope. To be able to hold your life. All of it, as it morphs into sweetness-
Thank you for reading for so long. And understanding.
Are you following the Diddy trial? It’s a phenomenal lesson on how it happens that we want to be with someone who treats us terribly. The ex-girlfriends (feels insane calling them that because Diddy is so awful) have worked so hard to explain how they just wanted to try to do what he wanted so he would give them the love he once gave them. It’s horrifying and enlightening.
Hi P
I just wanted to say thank you for being so raw and honest in your latest post.
I’ve come to the same conclusion about my own mum.
I’ve read every post for the last 11 years!
Love your work and your truth
I got so sleepy reading this one. And then I closed my eyes to take a bit of nap. I woke up thinking I have to work so hard to just let me feel this much pain. I’m not sure if I have the capacity for love. Love is learning to put on a show. Everyone around me just helping me put on the show for the kids.
I fell asleep writing it. So many times. And sometimes I think what is my problem that I’m so exhausted? You remind me it’s ok. The sleepiness is a sane reaction. Thank you.