Broken
As a child, my mother worked second shift. My brother, sister, and I would be left to fend for ourselves most evenings. We made the best of it. We would always find some sort of new game or adventure. We played fort, we played hide and seek, we played basketball, we played hard! Our living room was transformed into a city street, a forest, a jungle or a playground. Now, we didn’t have a lot, but I remember my mother had a few items that she treasured. On our living room table, a ceramic bull and matador set. She adored these pieces. Anyone one else have this set?
My mother used to leave us explicit instructions about playing in the house. We’d better not do it! We tried to adhere to her rules, but when it’s too cold to play outside, you’ve watched all of the cartoons you can find, and you’re tired of playing board games... tossing around the Nerf football won’t hurt anything! Right?!
Yeah right! My brother’s “stone hands” could not handle my pass and the matador took it right in the chest. OH NO! Ceramic matador hits hard wood floors and you already know the outcome.
On this day in particular, we had a lot of time before my mother would be home. All we needed to do was fix it. We thought about using duct tape...Nah... we only had grey duct tape. We thought about using scotch tape...Nah...she would see that. We decided to use glue. The only glue available was yellow, wood, glue. Yes, yellow, wood glue. The ceramic matador was brown with white accents. We were optimistic! We figured if we glued it back together, and wiped off the excess yellow, wood, glue there’s NO WAY she would notice!
We gathered up every piece of the wounded matador. We painstakingly glued each piece back together. We attempted to wipe off the excess but, the glue became tacky and parts of the paper towel we used to wipe the excess became part of the matador.
We put it together and placed it back in it’s usual place on the living room table. We cleaned the living room, carefully looking for any remaining evidence of the incident. Then we waited...we felt pretty confident with our work. No way she would notice the battered matador...even with the yellow, wood, glue seeping through the fractures.
Guess what? It didn’t take long for my mother to notice that her once proud matador had been reduced to an imperfect piece of ceramic, masked by wood glue and paper towels. We paid dearly for that moment of disobedience.
Our feeble attempt at repairing something broken, reminds me of how we wear masks in our lives, in order to give the appearance that we are okay.
How often have you looked in the eyes of another and said to yourself, I know what their going through? How often do you see pain, sorrow and grief in the eyes of another? How often do you look in the mirror and see your own pain? How often do we laugh when we want to cry? How often do we cry when we want to scream? How many times have we said yes when we wanted to say no. How many times have we gone along to get along.
We hide behind a lifetime of faulty repair work. We seek our repair from talk shows, self help books and inspirational emails. We don our masks daily, not realizing how the temporary glue is seeping through our fractured hearts and minds. We hope that we won’t be revealed.
We’ve been beaten, berated, demeaned, lied about, lied to, cheated on, talked about, hated, mistreated, used and abused. Yet we refuse to speak up, speak out, speak about, what we’ve been through. We won’t share what we’re going through in order to save another from this personal hell. It’s as if we want to see others in pain so that we won’t have to be alone. Will we ever be unbroken?
Kristal
