Hardened

Calluses fascinate me. I love how the skin hardens and thickens through repeated contact with the world. Calluses are not injuries. Unlike scars they are not permanent. Change the behavior that elicits the callus, and it disappears. Do more of the activity that creates the callus and it gets thicker, stronger, more pronounced. Often you can tell what kind of work a person does based on the calluses on their bodies. Our skin creates calluses wherever we use it, so calluses are not only for people who do plumbing or auto repair or work on the assembly line. String players, violinists and violists, get calluses on their necks whe they rest the instrument and on their finger tips. The fingertips are marked for all string players, the cellists, the bassists, the harpists. If you look at their fingers, you can tell. Calluses on their fingertips. The beloved gets calluses on her palms where she rests her wrists while typing. And feet calluses! They tell a story of what shoes we wear, how we walk and where, how we balance our bodies on the ground. Calluses respond to our body in the world and protect our bodies in the world.

I appreciate the hardening of skin into calluses, but there is a similar way that our minds harden to the world that frightens me. My mother hardened as she aged. In some ways she hardened daily, ossified like the trees in the petrified forest, turned to stone over many years as a result of the wind and air pressing down on them. Yet, there were moments of dramatic hardening, moments when I could see her turning her heart, her mind, her will to stone like mere mortals staring into the eyes of Medusa. There were events on her life that hardened her: her mother’s death, her cousin’s death, moving to Saginaw, my sister’s death, a stroke. She emerged from each changed, harder, grim, resigned. As a child and as an adult, I saw my mother harden, and I recoiled. I wanted something different for my life.

The hardening is like a callus. It is in some ways a healthy response to the world, it’s insults, it’s slights, it’s vagaries. Like a callus, the hardening is protective. It suggests resilience. Yet, it evokes bitterness and various forms of misery. The hardening is a retreat from goodness and kindness; a rational retreat in a world that is cruel, even brutal at times. Hardening saves the fleshy, exuberant underbelly of our being from the ravages of life. After trauma, hardening makes life more bearable, more survivable. I saw my mother harden and I saw the value of it but I do not want it for myself.

Yet, I can feel the stoniness sliding into my body. I feel myself hardening. In a world with nothing firm and good to offer me at the moment, it feels like hardening offers something solid, something reliable. Hardening though is not like the calluses that slough off. Turning to stone a permanent solution to the vagaries of climate. The circumstances may be different, but I fear I am my mother’s daughter, trapped in Saginaw, bitter, hard. So very hard.

  

The petrified forest from The National Park Service.

Filed under: Uncategorized