broken bones and the father wound

In a poem called “use everything” from my recently completed book, Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within, I wrote, “bad luck is the language of the unconscious.” In the eight weeks since breaking my right wrist and shoulder in a fall, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ponder and explore the meaning of those words.

My first response to my situation, once I was home from the hospital and coherent and functional enough to formulate a response, was shock, disappointment, and despair (“fallen again”). The accident, the injuries, the devastating effect on my life, everything about the situation in which I found myself seemed so cruel, so random, so meaningless. But the words I’d written earlier this year, my own words, kept coming back to me: bad luck is the language of the unconscious. And they challenged me to find some meaning, something useful, in what I was experiencing.

Prior to breaking my wrist and shoulder eight weeks ago, I’d only broken a bone at one other time in my life. I was very young, just learning to walk, and one of my lower legs was broken somehow while I was outside in the yard with my dad one evening. I’m not sure which leg. I think it was the left.

I’m also not completely sure of precisely how it happened. In the poem “dad I got” from Iron Man Family Outing, I wrote:

he leaves me behind
I try to catch him I break my leg …

That’s how I’ve always remembered the event: being left behind by my dad, trying to catch him, slipping on a wet sidewalk, falling and breaking my leg. And one other thing: his anger. He didn’t want me with him that evening, he didn’t want to have to deal with me, and he was angry about it. That was why he was walking away from me. This was the scenario I played out with him throughout my entire childhood. I needed him and needed to be with him, but he didn’t want me around, and he made no bones about it … so to speak.

About fifteen years ago, I told the story of my broken leg to my physician. His reaction stunned me. He said that if a parent came to him with a toddler with a broken leg and told him a story like mine, he’d find that explanation very hard to believe. He said that a fall on a sidewalk wouldn’t be nearly severe enough, in the typical case, to fracture the leg of a child that age. He also told me that hearing a story like that, in those circumstances, would make him wonder what really happened.

I was pretty shaken up to hear this. I knew what my father was capable of doing when he was angry at me. I wondered for a long time after that conversation if what I thought I’d remembered for all those years about the event was something I’d constructed on my own, or a story my mom had told me to protect my dad, or a story he’d told her to protect himself, or some combination of all of these. Or maybe, regardless of my physician’s skepticism, the story I’d remembered all along, even if it was a story someone else had told me, was basically correct.

I wanted more information, anything that would help me get to the truth. Conversations with both of my parents yielded nothing new. I tried to get my medical records from my childhood doctor, but he’d been retired for years and all of his patient records were long gone. So I was left with only mystery, possibility, and a story that may or may not be completely true, a story with which I’d been living for most of my life. And that was the best I could do with the information available to me at the time.

My current research strongly suggests that I may have suffered a “toddler’s fracture” which is described as follows:

A toddler (one to three years of age) can fracture the shinbone when he or she trips over a toy or falls down a stair while learning to walk.

Another source says:

Toddler’s fractures can also be known as spiral fractures. The mechanism of the injury is usually trivial (i.e. tripping or twisting the ankle) and usually involves a twisting or rotational injury … Some of the older literature suggests that a spiral fracture is always due to child abuse. This is not correct. Spiral fractures may be caused by an abusive incident, but they also may result from accidental trauma.

This is hardly a definitive explanation, in terms of answering all of my questions and addressing all of my doubts with complete certainty, but it does seem to lead me full circle back to my original recollection of the event and how it happened.

The one thing I know for sure is that I was with my father when I broke my leg, and that regardless of how it happened, that experience formed a point of deep connection with him, a connection around physical pain. I wrote about this connection, and its origins in the broken leg story (as best I knew it at the time), in the following poem from Iron Man Family Outing:

charley horse

leg hurting tonight reminds me of how my dad + I used to
run across each other in the dark
when I was little + my leg would hurt.

he had a lot of leg cramps at night
he called that a goddam charley horse
I used to wake up with intense pain in my leg
the leg I broke
trying to catch up with him
when I was first learning to walk.

sometimes we’d both wake up at the same time
on the same night
I liked this because I got to spend some quiet time
alone with him.

I never wanted to go back to bed on those nights
we’d sit in the living room or the kitchen
in the dark or with a dim light on
he seemed more open in those moments
I didn’t feel like he hated me then
maybe it was because he was sleepy
or in pain.

those were special occasions for me
nothing to accomplish or be judged on
we each had our own pain
similar but not the same
he was empathetic
I felt connected to him.

in those brief moments
I always felt that I was just like him
just like I always wanted to be.

My father and the men of his generation were masters at controlling and denying the pain in their bodies. In many ways, this was a necessity. He worked in a factory (the “the new moon werewolf factory” as I put it in “dynamite dick”), in brutal, exhausting, dangerous physical conditions. He had a family to support, and he didn’t make that much money. He couldn’t afford the luxury of surrendering to aches and pains, or even injuries. He had to work, and he had to sacrifice his body to do it.

A few years before he retired, I asked my father to take me inside the factory where he’d worked and spent most of his adult years, a complex of connected windowless buildings I’d only seen previously from the outside at the employee’s entrance, where every eight hours, the men walked in big and walked out small. In the following excerpt from a poem called “the father I knew” from Scapegoat’s Cross, I described what it was like on the inside:

I was in the belly of that steel and concrete monster
that eater of men
of lives and bodies and families and marriages and dreams
where he spent most of his life
it felt like the heaviest place on earth
no windows no sun no plants no sky no trees no animals
just steel and concrete and oil and chemicals and fire and smoke
and a big machine that swallowed his left arm
all the way up to the shoulder …

The “big machine that swallowed his left arm” is another major element in my “father mythology” and the mythology of my childhood. The story I was always told, by my mom, was that my dad’s left arm was sucked into the huge steel rollers of a machine at work while he was cleaning it with a rag. She said the doctor told him the damage was so severe that he’d never have the use of his left arm again, which was especially devastating given that he was left-handed. My dad’s response: “Like hell I won’t.” He then went home and built some sort of device with pulleys and weights, set it up on the front porch, used it to rehab his arm on his own, and recovered the use of that arm completely.

That’s the story I was told anyway. Is it absolutely true? Again, I have no way to know for sure. But I saw that big machine for myself, and my father showed me the dents that were still there, almost thirty years later, in the steel rollers where the bones in his arm were squeezed through the metal. So I know something major happened. I know he got hurt pretty badly. I know he recovered, and I don’t doubt that it was largely through his own determination and efforts, given that there probably wasn’t a lot of help, in terms of skilled physical therapy, available to him at the time.

So now, I find myself connected to my father once again through injury, pain, and the struggle to heal. Bad luck, the language of the unconscious, has spoken, giving me yet another opportunity to explore the depths and the subtleties of the father wound, and to revisit that mysterious empathetic connection through common physical pain that I felt so strongly with him as a child.

He was left-handed and lost the use of his left arm for a time due to injury. I’m right-handed and now I’ve lost the use of my right arm for a time due to injury. He must have struggled to recover, whatever the actual scenario may have been, just as I have. But he also had the additional pressure of a family to support. And he didn’t have the benefit of the excellent medical care and physical therapy I’ve had the good fortune to receive.

Frankly, I don’t know how he did it. And I don’t know how I would have done it had I been in his shoes at the time he did it.

My father turns 75 today. He was not a good father to me in many ways. He was distant, demeaning, neglectful, abusive, threatening, angry, and violent. He did a tremendous amount of damage to me emotionally and psychologically as a child, and his mistreatment continued into my adulthood. But as the years have passed and I’ve gained in life experience, I’ve found it easier to see him, not just as the father I knew and not just as the father I needed and didn’t have, but as a more complete human being who had his own struggles, strengths, and burdens, as we all do.

I haven’t seen my father in ten years. Haven’t spoken to him in five. I believe this is for the best. He hasn’t been able to hurt me physically for a long time now, but he was never going to stop hurting me emotionally and psychologically, no matter what I did or how hard I tried. The moment when I finally realized that fact, in a flood of tears and pain and anger and grief, was the moment when I finally knew for sure, once and for all, that it was hopeless for me to keep trying to reach out to him.

But his life continues to influence mine, even across the distance of time and space, in ways both obvious and mysterious, as I continue to work toward resolution and completion of my relationship with him, that distant point on the inner horizon of my psyche toward which I am always aiming and always moving, but may never reach.

The broken bones and the father wound by Rick Belden, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.