Good girls don’t cry

Hast thou no scar?

No wound? No scar?
Yet as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole. Can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?

~ Amy Carmichael

Yesterday was what’s known as a day. It involved a pretty awful trip to the dentist, which if you have a medical history involving extensive maxillofacial work and complex dentistry, is par for the course. It is what it is and I’m used to it. I have a slightly crooked but stiff upper lip. I’m stoic. My face is scarred but brave. I’m a good girl and I don’t cry.

Except for yesterday. Yesterday I cried.

Big, fat, silent tears which seeped down the sides of my face as I lay back in the dreaded chair, with my mouth agape and my hands clenched. They dripped down onto the floor and onto one of the crocs worn by my dentist, a young man who is kind in a matter-of-fact, gruff, Germanic sort of fashion, which comforts me more than being fussed over. Fussing would only have made me cry more.

It was an experience that was emotionally distressing as well as horribly, physically painful. By the end of it I was sodden through with sweat, red-eyed and shaking. When I got home I vomited. Pain sucks. I’m told I’m one of the trailblazers for dental implants, as there’s not many of us with one as old as mine. It lives for another day thanks to Ben, my dentist, but also thanks to me and my obsessive flossing regimen. Today, I’m going to drop him off a thank you card and a new jibbitz for his crocs.

My face contains an implant within an implant, one made out of titanium, and the one it’s embedded in which is made out of bone. The titanium implant is twenty years old and was necessary because one of my top incisors snapped off when I was just twenty-three, not a great age to have a crone-ish, gappy smile, but I didn’t cry about it. That would have made me look even uglier, and anyway, I’ve been taught that good girls don’t cry.

For the next three years, I had a hideous false tooth on a brace plate, until eventually I was invited to take part in a clinical trial at Manchester Dental School. A consultant dentist was doing research into whether it was possible to put titanium dental implants into cleft lip and palate patients who’d undergone bone implants in childhood. The bone implant is to replace the bone that’s missing, of course, and in my case it was meant to preserve my adult incisor. Clearly, it hadn’t worked.

My bone implant, which is really a graft, is thirty-seven years old. It came from my right hip, and I have a very impressive scar to commemorate its excavation from my childhood body. That hip hurts now, more so every year, but I don’t cry about it. Old habits die hard.

As a nine year old, lying in a hospital bed with a drip in my ankle and a bag of blood draining from my hip, I tried not to cry. In fact, I took pride in not crying. On that fortnight long hospital visit just before Christmas 1988, I cried only once. After many days of lying in the bed post-surgery, unable to move, the feeling began to return to my legs accompanied by agonising pains. I started to cry and my mother told me off.

“See? The other girls aren’t crying,” she said, pointing to the two girls nearby who’d also had bone grafts, who weren’t crying at that moment, but they had cried, at various times. Now they were being brave and I was being a mard-arse, which was making her mad, so despite the pain of the heavy drip bottle, stitched into the wound on my hip, and despite the knife-sharp aches in my leaden legs, I had to stop being a baby and be good like the other girls. Crying was bad.

This was my mother’s approach to caring for a sick child, her version of tough love. Maybe her approach was right. She’s subsequently told me that she had to be hard to ensure I wasn’t soft, as that wouldn’t do at all. I needed to be tough.

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time in hospital as a child will know that no matter how much you cry, painful, inconvenient and at times frightening things will happen to you, and getting worked up about it will make it all so much worse. You do just have to get on with it, and in doing so you will be profoundly transformed, growing up to be an adult who revels in humour of the darkest kind, has a ridiculously high pain threshold, and a low tolerance for other people’s wimpy twinges and complaints. In short, I’ve grown up to be more like my own mother than I would like. Damn.

I realise now, after having four kids of my own, that she needed me not to cry not for my sake, but for her own. To see your child in pain is a particular kind of unbearable agony, and so she demanded my uncomplaining compliance, dressed up as bravery, because if I’d cried she wouldn’t have been able to cope. She would have cried too, then we’d both have been crying, and all those tears and raw emotions would have made the whole thing even harder.

Nowadays, all I seem to do is cry. This is the fallout of more than two years of massive stress and trauma. This year has contained more joy and happiness than I ever knew was possible, but it’s like the walls of my defences have been pulled down and now forty-six years worth of emotion is gushing out. It’s strangely cleansing.

I’ve prayed and asked God to give me strength, and instead he’s humbled me with weakness and weeping. I’ve asked for the courage to speak up, and he’s given me the freedom to wail. I wanted living water and God has given me tears. There is a gift in all of this and that gift is liberation. I no longer have to pretend that everything is fine when it blatantly, shockingly is not. Jesus wept and I’ll never feel ashamed to do the same.

I’ve had a stiff-upper lip, metaphorically as well as literally, when it was sewn up with tiny stitches, and neither was my best demonstration of courage. I know now that suffering in silence can lead to a soul-death which you’ll never recover from, and that suffering out loud can be a sign of strength not weakness. By boldly telling a story of suffering, you model for other people how to bear it, which gives them the courage to do the same. It’s the kind of courage which sows hope and says, “I survived this and you can too.” It makes you the sort of person people want to sit beside when they feel like crying too, because they know you’ll hold their hand.

I struggle to relate to those always upstanding and never bending, stronger than oak and never phased by anything people. You know, people like I used to be. If you’ve not suffered, or can’t humble yourself to admit it, how can you demonstrate to others that you’ve lived? Or, to put it another way, can you have travelled far if hast thou no scar?

I realise now, what I wish I’d known from the start, that I am not a good girl and I don’t need to be. Good girls don’t cry, but courageous ones do.

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I regret to inform you that I’ve been messing about on Canva again, which can only mean one thing. I’ll put this out in a fuller post next week, but I’ve decided to put all my gardening posts on a separate Substack, conscious that not everyone is as enamoured of the whole thing as I am! If you’d like to subscribe to that, so you can follow along as I transform my boxy back yard into something beautiful, then the link is here. All posts will be free. There’s already a small and excellent little bunch of subscribers. (One of them is my husband. Another one is me 😬)

Thanks also to everyone who expressed an interest in the writing group idea. It’s still very much in its embryonic stage, but if you haven’t read about it yet, you can catch up on that at the end of this post here:

Friday (Saturday) Thought

All the best,