Every time a manicurist brings an emery file to my skin – where the nail turns into a finger – I worry: am I going to get cut today?
My manicurist looks at me with sympathy and sarcasm:
– I remember your “injury”, I hold you here with my fingers, the saw will not reach there, – she reassures.
And so every three weeks for more than 4 years that we are with her.
I know she won’t cut me. She never cut me.
I don’t even do a manicure, in which you have to cut something, they just shape the nails and cover them with varnish.
But I’ve been cut before. And although you can’t cut to death with a plastic saw, and all you can do is injure the cuticle not even to the point of blood, I sweat and twitch as if before death.
And suddenly today I thought about how many injuries we carry inside ourselves, which we don’t notice, but at the same time, by twitching out of habit, we can really secure a cut for ourselves.
*
Once my mother and I were on vacation in Egypt. She was on a tour all day and I asked that dinner be brought to her room because she didn’t have time for it. She arrived late, I had to get up at 4 a.m. because I was going on my excursion and besides, I had a migraine.
And now, lying in bed, I understand by the sound that she has eaten and is collecting the plates, I raise my head and say: “Leave everything as it is, in the morning the waiter will collect them and take them away.”
I repeated it one more time, then another, and then I already rehearsed that every sound of ceramic dishes was ringing a bell on my unfortunate head. As a result, twitching in convulsions at every rattle, she was forced to listen to the hellish concert to the end. While my mother washes every damn dish, in a stone sink of a five-star hotel, which is not at all adapted for washing these fucking huge UFO-like plates.
My mother is an elderly woman. Our relationship is very difficult. The last time she and I vacationed together was 30 years ago. And we left together with the idea of trying to somehow fix our relationship. And do you think she will sneeze at me and what hurts me? Unlikely.
I know she loves me more than life, but “what will the waiter think when he finds dirty dishes in the room in the morning?” clearly won.
Including common sense.
My mother lived with my father’s parents all her life, where she was abused by the whole family and in every way. I will only say that, as far as I can remember, dirty dishes were not left unwashed, even if after washing them you were taken to the cemetery.
*
I remember how I was foaming at the mouth swearing with my ex-husband that vacuuming must be done on Sunday morning. I couldn’t explain why you can’t sleep when you want and vacuum when you want. Much later in therapy, I realized that my father was forcing me to do this. And that it’s one day off a week when you don’t have to wake up in the dark to go to school. All the same, you have to get up, grope, without tearing your eyes, clean up, and then wander around completely salted all day. Don’t go to bed anymore, because it’s late, don’t walk, don’t go because you don’t have the strength.
*
There are many such stories. I think everyone has. The horror is that we do not realize our destructive actions and spoil, spoil, spoil the relationship that we really want to save.
That’s how we hear “I won’t come” as “go to hell, I don’t need you”, in “come on” – “you’re a clumsy pancake, you have to do everything yourself”, in “I love you” – “your mother, now I will have to marry her” and then a terrible broken phone of thoughts, feelings, actions.
Psychotherapy helps to stop this cycle. To understand why we do what we do and what we would like as a result of this action. Perhaps it should be understood and replaced with something else. Of course, some injuries are very difficult and take a long time to first identify and then to heal. But the road will be overcome by the one who walks. Of course, if there is a desire to manage your own life, and not to spin in the torrent of someone’s ideas.
Once, in situations similar to manicures, I held my breath, sweated, and struggled to appear “normal.” Now, as I put my fingers in the other’s hands, I consciously choose to breathe, rely on the experience that this person has never cut me, and still continue to relieve my anxiety by reminding her of my fear for the hundredth time, without fear of looking ridiculously stupid or like -anything that’s more
Now I have a lot in my arsenal. Including the right to do what she could not afford before. And this is one of the thousands that psychotherapy can give. One of thousands…
