I still don’t know how to answer when my kids ask about my scars
Last Tuesday I was flipping chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, it was already 82 degrees by 8 a.m. so I’d thrown on an old cut-off tank I found at a garage sale, no sleeves to hide anything. Mia, my 7 year old, was perched on the step stool next to me shoving chips in her mouth before I could mix the batter, and she stopped mid-bite to poke my forearm right where the big pale scar runs. “Mom, how’d you get this again?” she said, like she asks once every couple months. I froze, spatula hovering over the griddle, because I still don’t have an answer I’m happy with.
It’s not like it’s a secret. It’s just… messy. The scar’s almost 20 years old now, lumpy at the edges where the ER doc stitched it up in a hurry when I showed up alone at 19. I was working a night shift at a 24-hour coffee shop downtown, hadn’t eaten anything solid in three days, was couch surfing and dealing with a lot of garbage I didn’t know how to name back then. I passed out while I was washing a stack of big bread knives, fell right forward onto the sharp edge. It wasn’t anything intentional, don’t get me wrong— but it’s still tangled up in all that messy, sad, stupid stuff I went through when I was too young to know how to ask for help. I don’t really like digging it up, even for me. It catches on knit sweaters sometimes, and I have to yank it free, and I still skip over it when I’m putting on lotion most days, without even thinking about it.
For years I just wore long sleeves even in summer. When I met my husband, I told him I fell off my bike going down a big hill when I was a teen. I didn’t lie on purpose, really, it was just easier than unpacking the whole thing in one go on the third date. Now I’ve got two kids who notice everything, and I can’t hide it forever. Last week at the community pool I couldn’t hide it under a cover up because it got soaked through the second I got in, and Mia pointed it out to her little friend from kindergarten, loud as anything: “Look at my mom’s scar! It’s so big! Do you know how she got it?” I just mumbled something about an old accident and grabbed the kids’ lemonade cups and walked away, my face hot. It felt awful afterward, like I’d just taught her that scars are something to be embarrassed about, that some parts of me are too yucky to talk about. That’s the opposite of what I want to teach them, right? I’m always yelling at them that all bodies are good bodies, that scrapes and marks are just proof you lived. But when it’s my own marks, I clam right up.
I grew up with my aunt Linda, who had a big thick scar running right across her stomach, and no one ever would talk about it. I was 8, same age as Mia almost, and I made up all these wild stories in my head— she’d been attacked by a bear, she’d had a whole organ stolen, she did something bad and got punished. It was years before I found out she’d had a miscarriage when she was young, and everyone just thought it was too unseemly to talk about. I hate that I’m doing the same thing to my kids, letting them make up whatever weird scary story in their heads instead of just telling them the truth, whatever that is.
After the pool incident, Javi, my 10 year old, came up to me while I was folding laundry and asked again, quieter this time. “Is it from when you were sad before you met dad?” He hears me talk sometimes about how hard things were when I was young, so he’s picked up on that. I just sat there for a minute, folding the same sock over and over, and I said yeah. It was from when I was really young, and I had a really hard time, and I got hurt really bad. I didn’t tell him about not eating, or being homeless, or any of that. Just that. And you know what he did? He nodded, and then he said “Can we order pizza for dinner instead of the salad you were talking about?” And that was it. He didn’t need more. Last night Mia asked if it still hurts, and I said no, not anymore, it just itches sometimes when it rains. She hugged my arm, squished her cheek against the scar, and said “It looks cool. Like a lightning bolt on your arm.” Then she ran off to watch silly dance clips on my phone.
So that went okay, right? But I’m still laying awake at night thinking about it. What do I do when they get older, and they ask more questions? Do I tell them the whole thing then? Is it okay to only tell them a little bit now, when they’re little? I’ve seen other people talk about how “just be fully honest! It builds trust!” but what does fully honest look like with a 7 year old? Do I tell her that I used to hate myself so much I didn’t think I deserved to eat? That feels like dumping a whole lot of my garbage on her that she can’t process. I don’t want her to worry about me, you know? She’s 7, she should be worried about whether her goldfish is happy, not whether her mom was sad 20 years ago. But if I don’t tell her, am I making my own past seem shameful? Am I teaching her to hide parts of herself if they’re messy?
I caught myself pulling my sleeve down this morning when we were walking to the bus stop, even though it’s 85 degrees out. It’s just a habit, one I’ve had for half my life, and I don’t know how to break it. I don’t want my kids to have that habit. I want them to be okay with their own messy marks, their own messy pasts. But I don’t know how to model that when I’m still figuring it out myself.
Anyone who’s been here? Anyone who’s got old messy scars tied to old messy stuff, and kids who ask questions? What do you say? Do you hold back, or do you lay it all out? Is there a middle ground that doesn’t feel like lying, and doesn’t feel like too much? I’m not looking for some perfect inspirational answer, I just want to know what other real people do. (Word count: ~1120)
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