Tag Archives: heartbreak

8th grade hazing, or Valentine’s Day Massacre


In the hallway the boys gather about in smelly heaps like old laundry, laughing and pointing and dancing in their ridiculously large sneakers. Hair sticking out in every direction, body odor of newly minted puberty encircling them in a miasma, they crow like four-month roosters, stomping their feet on the small pieces of paper scattered on the ground.

Each square has a blotch of red on it, some writing, a signature.

One boy picks up a larger piece and theatrically tears it into small then smaller then tiny pieces, throws it into the air like confetti. The other boys bat at it, sending the shreds flying around through the hallway.

The boys’ voices crack as they hoot and cat-call, which makes them shout louder. The teachers are nowhere to be found.

To the side a small girl stands, dressed in a slightly off-fashion red bodysuit and plaid skort, uncertain shoes, long hair massing about her head in a ‘my mother won’t let me cut it’ study of split ends and tangles. Head down, she tries to slip by, unseen, escape down the hallway to the exit, but she can’t avoid the tangle of boys, the shouts, the destruction.

The boys spot her, and the pointing and yelling sharpens, knife-like. Like a murder of crows, they caw in her face, pull at her hair, scoop up the shreds of paper off the floor and throw them at her. Winter gravel is mixed with the paper which stings as it hits her. The papers don’t fly well, and this makes the boys finally give up in frustration and turn away. They slam the doors open, shoving each other, grinning back at her.

One boy is quieter than the rest. He knows the girl, they were friends of a sort, of whatever sort boys and girls could be friends in grade eight, clouded in hormones and poor judgement. He shouts through the noise to the boys, “Let’s go, she’s not worth it.”

She looks over at him, her face dead. She’s frozen, mortally wounded, unable to edge one cell forward out of there. Minutes after the boys finally tumble out of the door and outside, away, she thaws enough to move.

Bending forward, she gathers up the shreds of her valentines, silent. Alone.

Dear mum


MollyBrownPoster

Well, Margaret Warner, actually. Unsinkable, certainly.

I’m thinking of you today. I’m not sure why this bright winter day brings you to mind, but maybe it’s a confluence of two things I’ve read. The first was “Dear Fatty”, by Dawn French – her memoir, written as a series of letters to people she knows and loves. We never shared Dawn – she came on the scene here a little bit after you left. I know you’d have loved her, her crazy humour – that is, if you could get past her being so round and the occasional shocking bit.  I can hear your voice saying something like, “She’d be so pretty if she weren’t so heavy,” much as you said to me on more than one occasion that I needed to lose weight but, I “could still move well.” And I had “such lovely skin.” I think you’d have loved her parish council in The Vicar of Dibley, given your work with the church and probably a very similar council.

I don’t think you’d have liked French and Saunders – I think something about their drinking and fooling around would have left you profoundly uncomfortable, as you seemed to be with Monty Python. Do you remember when Life of Brian came out and there was all this fuss about the sacrilege? You came down on the “not to be seen” side, as I recall, but I saw it anyways and it remains one of my favourite movies.

Thank you for being that someone I could test myself against, push my ideas against, form myself against. We didn’t think alike in most ways, and now that I am about your age when you discovered your cancer, I realize that I missed getting to really know you. We spent so much time butting heads, politely, always politely, but I missed getting to know the fun you you shared with my cousins and your friends.

You had mothering goals with me and I suppose I am the same with my kids, trying to be accepting and encouraging and laugh endlessly with them but always having that motherhood light attached, blinking concern at the wrong moment, putting my foot wrong. I used to think I was such a good mom. Funny how that changes as you grow older, how you see the gaps where you could have done better, where you missed that bit, where that little bit of mothering knitting dropped a stitch, purled when it should have knitted. I wonder if you ever felt that.

You always seemed supremely confident. But maybe you, like me, sang “Whistle a Happy Tune” as you stepped into new situations, faking confidence, you with such élan. I wish I knew. Maybe if I thought you’d had doubts I would have felt closer to you, as I fought my way to adulthood. As it is, I felt all weakness was an embarrassment to you. God knows how you would have taken my bouts of depression. Mental illness, to you, was a sign of weakness. And scary as hell. Because of this we barely saw my father’s family with their admitted mental health problems – though to tell the truth I often thought your family could have done with a little counselling now and again.

But maybe, maybe, it was so scary to you because you knew it, fought against it, dreaded the contagion that comes when a depressed person gets pulled into another depressed person’s circle. I know that feeling. I hide, too.

The other thing that brings you to mind is a short story, “The Woman who Sold Communion” by Kate Braverman (McSweeney’s early fall, 2004). In this, a woman is denied tenure and falls apart, heads down to meet up with her mother, a woman she ran away from, a woman who lives like a hippie out in the desert. She goes there because she knows she is safe there, even though she and her mum don’t seem to have much in common.

Once, when my marriage was falling apart, in the early days when I was expecting my youngest, I called you. I had had enough, I said. I couldn’t bear being with such an angry man. Your response was: “Come home.” I was shocked. You were, above all, a staunch Catholic. Leaving a marriage was a big thing.

I sometimes wish I had trusted you and perhaps taken that step. Instead I thought you were looking for company, and resisted. But the fact that you said what you did to me made it safe for me to continue on, to stick it out for another 15 years, some good, some bad. Because you gave me permission not to, and a safe place to go.

Miss you.

well, drat that dorsal anterior cingulate, anyway!


An article in the Globe and Mail this week pointed out research on the brain that indicated that if your heart was broken, metaphorically speaking, you showed  the same response in your brain as when you have physical pain.  They suggested Tylenol for the pain of heartache following a tragic romance. Interestingly, the research also showed that your response to having something hot held against your hand could predict your reaction to a social snub.

Well, as someone who passed a kidney stone in the middle of the night with naught but a few confused writhings (I know, TMI), does this mean I am destined to be an unfeeling slob in matters of the heart? Perhaps that old cingulate is just numb from stem to stern.

Maybe this explains why I can be so completely inappropriate in social situations and not notice the scornful looks of my peers, or care about them except as something to capture for my next description of same?  Does this explain my ability to take my dog out for walks while unwashed, dressed in mismatching mittens and a hat from the Salvation Army (not a one-size-fits-all baseball cap, thankfully – things haven’t slid THAT far)?

And does this explain my lack of compassionate responses to my kids, who, when they complained about a sore hand, were offered surgery to cut the offending part off? Could you guess I was a nurse? Able to hide my compassion while I get the task done? (Or maybe more like Nurse Ratchet, secretly enjoying the pain of others?)

And perhaps it explains the absolute effectiveness of a glass of red wine to deal with sadness and all that. A little mental anesthesia and the thoughts of loneliness or sadness vanish.  Although it works much better with some good chocolate as well…

In the article, it was reported that researchers found that an acetaminophen tablet helped reduce the feeling of social hurt.

“Compared to individuals given a placebo, those given daily acetaminophen reported fewer hurt feelings over a period of three weeks. The researchers also examined brain scans of individuals experiencing social rejection and found that those taking acetaminophen showed reduced activity in the regions of the brain associated with pain’s unpleasant aspects.”

Valentine’s Day is coming.  After my grade 8 experience where I gave my favourite boys valentines only to find them having a little party later stomping on them in the school hallway (ouch), I’m thinking maybe I should go out and get a bottle of extra strength Tylenol. Even if that cingulate is a wee bit numb, there’s no point in taking chances….

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/if-your-heart-is-broken-could-tylenol-help/article1892155/