The Strength of our Scars

 

Warning: This reflection includes a bit of description of three Csections...

We have been blessed by three children. I had three C sections; three different cuts and scars. When the second child was being extracted, there was a moment of panic when I was told that what was taking so long (Csections are usually very brief procedures) was the surgeon was having difficulty cutting through scar tissue from the first child. All worked out in the end and I was warned that the incision was not as clean as it might have been?! I will stop there and leave the third laborious and jagged birthing surgery to your imagination except to say a different anesthesia was used and yet a third incision was made?! 

I spent years wondering about this uniqueness I literally wore on my body. The words “we have never seen anyone develop such strong scar tissue” were at first a badge of shame and have become more of a curiosity. I search periodically for consolations and meaning as the desolation and embarassment fade. Scar tissue photos can be beautiful. And I do value strength and resilience...

That is all the background to explain why when I saw a book entitled The Strength in our Scars by Bianca Sparacino, I devoured it. 

I have always believed in and practiced non-dualistic thinking. Scar tissue cannot be either good or bad. I have even come to think of this bodily tattoo of sorts as a thin space, a threshold between the incarnate and the spiritual, a threshold between life before and life after birth. 

So I leave you to ponder these words by Sparacino: “ I am a firm believer in there being beauty in the contrast. In the light and the dark days. In the hope and the hurt. In the fire and in the ash. I am a firm believer in the fall and in the rise; in the sin and in the saving. I am a firm believer in the broken, the people who hold their pieces together with belief, who bandage their fear in faith. I am a firm believer in the souls who have always managed to protect their soft; who have always known, even when it ached the most, that their wounds were healing them, that the hardest parts of life were growing them from the inside. I am a firm believer in there being beauty in the contrast - you have not lived until you have died. “

Perhaps my scar tissue holds my pieces together like the gold filament of kintsugi pottery. It reminds me I am broken, strong and vulnerable. It reminds me I have been blessed!