To say that I have avoided this moment for over a year would be an understatement. I do not enjoy this part of Halloween. Painting wounds and gore makes me extremely uncomfortable, no matter how unrealistic.
I believe I’ve got a good reason.
My mother was “a cutter” in the vernacular of the day. I don’t know what the term is now. For a while it was self abuse. She would use various tools to cut into the skin of her arms, thighs, abdomen and breasts.
I’m not telling tales out of school - this is information that she willingly (at times almost bragging) shared with people who asked about her scars (including my very small children - without my consent or knowledge - for which I harbor a grudge that cannot be resolved).
I don’t get what you all see in gore, and I think it’s because I saw it myself, regularly, over a half a decade. I think I was around 15 the first time she cut that I knew of it. I do not think it was the first time.
We argued over my getting a ride to driver’s ed with the mom of another student. My mother insisted that we didn’t “know” these people, an I insisted that it was a MOM driving her KID to driver’s ed, a mom with enough resources to have her child enrolled in a private girl’s school in Springfield, and likely kidnapping an additional teenager from a socially disadvantaged situation wouldn’t be high on her list of priorities.
There was a lot of screaming. Me insisting my father had paid for the class and I was going if I had to walk, and her insisting I was not getting in the car with “a stranger”.
I won when Debbie’s mom pulled up in a beat down brown Rabbit, and I climbed in the back. My mother threw her dinner plate at me as I exited. I heard it hit the door. I think Debbie drove, and I was so jealous. I was only allowed to drive with my father in his huge work vehicles.
The Boston and Maine railroad would not have approved.
When I returned home it was extremely quiet in the apartment. Extremely, eerily quiet.
I found my mother in the little powder room, blood in Dixie cups in a row on the sink, a shard of broken china nearby. My mother stirred when I shook her. I thought she was dead, she was so pale. There was so much blood - in the row of tiny cups, on the wall, the floor, the toilet, all over her. A string of horizontal slashes went up her forearm.
Her eyes fluttered and she slurred “Lissa. Look what you made me do. Why do you make me do things like this? You need to clean it up.”
I do not remember crying or responding. I don’t remember how I got her wrapped up and into bed - I was about 95# and she was closer to 200#. I do not remember cleaning up.
I do remember that on the morning she asked me how many cups there were, and where I had put the plate shard.
Later the weapon of choice shifted to single edge razors, and the area expanded from the arms onto anyplace she could reach. Later I would learn not to clean up after her. I would be asked not to help her. I would eventually learn to call her shrink and rat her out and let him “handle it”. This often involved midnight taxi rides to the ER, with me loading her into the cab and him paying the bill. I did have to help with dressing changes at times, and I almost always cleaned up because I just couldn’t let it sit there.
He, the shrink, said it was not my responsibility. But I never got over part where I believed it was my fault. I still believe it, deep down. She would remind me that I had “started it” that night I went to driver’s ed.
As I painted these scratches a voice deep in my memory slurred “Lissa. Why do you make me do these things?” Well, one and done my friends. One. And. Done.
So face painters of the world, and the Connecticut River valley in particular, enjoy your gore. I’ll be over here painting cute ghosts and unicorns in witch hats, grinning candy corn, and a skull or two.
