Self-Harm and Motherhood
I undressed and covered my legs with the thin sheet, hiding the fine white channels threading my thighs, the pale pools of scars: long-healed injuries from cigarettes and razors, a curling iron. I lay on the table, my feet in the stirrups and tensed as the nurse midwife probed with ring forceps to remove the IUD inside me, metal steely chill within my uterus. I could feel myself leaving my body, as I once did while self-harming.
After the nurse midwife and tech left, allowing me to dress, I stared at the poster on the wall outlining warning signs during pregnancy and postpartum. I read, “If you have thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, seek professional help.” I took a step closer, pushing my glasses, which had slipped during the procedure, back up my nose. Above the stick woman cradling a stick baby floated a thought balloon with a skull and crossbones.
Poison, poison thoughts, I repeated to myself, as I accelerated home through rush hour traffic on M-59, a highway cutting across Detroit’s northern suburbs. And, What am I but a walking poison thought?
That has been the gist of my question as my husband and I have discussed becoming parents: Will my poison thoughts infect my child? Will my longed-for daughter, my little “Jessica Margaret,” someday be similarly scarred? And why is self-harm so gendered, making me fear passing on the behavior to a daughter but not a son?
Self-harm, though better understood now than when I began burning my thighs with a curling iron twenty years ago, remains mysterious, stigmatized, and the youth and adults who engage in the behavior othered, as if we might be contagious..
And perhaps, though I hate to admit it, we are.
The year I was seven, my family and I went on a summertime picnic to Metro Beach, at 16 Mile and Gratiot, the place where Detroiters went to get away from it all. Fishfly stink, crunch, crunch on the sidewalks, and the lighter fluid igniting the tarry smoke of charcoal flame as my dad grilled hamburger after hamburger for my rowdy teenage brothers, who downed them with gobs of ketchup and mustard galore, then threw the football, calling snaps, “Hut, hut, hike.” My family gathered around the grill: my two older brothers, the eldest adopted; my sister, seven years older than me, also adopted; and me and my twin brother. I was expecting the fireflies to come out, one by one, flares lighting then snapping out in the gathering dusk, as if God snapped his fingers.
That’s not the way the sun went down that evening, though. No, God did not snap his fingers. Rather, it was a fireball that bled long down the sky, swimming in roses and oranges and purples, a lingering goodbye to a summer’s day. I wandered from my family, even though I had been warned, “Now, don’t get too far away.” I had been taught from a young age to fear “bad men,” especially in public places, coming for me, snatching me. But, this evening, the water’s edge drew me, the lapping of Lake St. Clair, which I imagined to be the ocean even though I could see across it, and crunch, crunch underneath my pink glow-in-the-dark Stride Rites went the fish flies as I clambered down the rocks to the shoreline amid the beer cans and salt-encrusted tires thrown up by the lake and the odd foamy plastic, the filmy plastic casings that I didn’t know enough to call “condoms.” I knew only that they had something to do with the teenagers who came here, something slick and slimy and magic.
I knelt at the water’s edge and arranged myself, sitting, just like Ariel in The Little Mermaid—upper body turned, lower body I imagined to be a fishtail off to one side—and scooped up a handful of water. I let the droplets slide off my fingers, watching them glint in the evening light, glimmer and bead, and imagined them to be aquamarine and opals and blue topaz. I scooped up another handful. I let it trickle onto my legs. I prayed, biting my lower lip and screwing my eyes shut.
Soon, God would turn me into a mermaid, and I would swim away—
Away from the men with rotting-peach paunches who saluted my city-council father in his suit and power tie on Crocker Boulevard and, mistaking me for a boy with my hated bowl cut, jabbed at me, mumbling through cigarette reek, “What’s your son’s name?”
Swim away, too, from the older boy, sleek as a ferret, with a doubloon lust, who had chased me down and pinned me in the gravel beneath the jungle gym at St. Luke. Away from his fisherman hands that made me so very, very heavy, sodden, waterlogged, unable to rise, a freak, lying there long after he was gone, my legs rubber and strange below me when I finally stumbled up and away, how his trawling hands turned earth to sea, and sea to sky, made me, not girl any longer, but dead sparrow, hooked and played through sea turned yellow sky.
Most of all, I would swim away from the fevered rage that ran through my family home in the hot, August days when my dad was away at work, my mom struggled with five children, and I hid with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the attic, the sweat beading thick in the small of my back, as I sought to bury myself in Narnia, to hide from the chaos erupting downstairs. In those days, my sister ran her fingers through my tangles and said, “Your fairy godmother spun your hair into gold, Meggie.”
I didn’t wish for my sister’s raven black hair. I didn’t want to be blonde. I longed for red tresses like Ariel’s. I didn’t know the other meaning of the word “siren,” or that sirens had red hair. I only knew sirens wailed in my throat and refused to sing.
Violence soothed violence.
I have my own history with extreme self-violence. In 2010, I inflicted third degree burns on my thigh with a curling iron. Now, remembering, I see myself from a distance, pressing the curling iron into my flesh, as if the roof of the attic room in which I crouched were removed. In the memory, which I often relive, I float high, high above in the night sky, among the stars, among the trees that whisper to me of freedom achieved through pain. And when I finally stop, the skin has charred in the spot where I held the curling iron to my thigh, the surrounding flesh turned yellow and hard as boutique French cheese.
I have complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, which psychologists conclude arises from repeated trauma, particularly childhood trauma. It is a heavy diagnosis: Its symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, emotional dysregulation, relationship difficulties, and suicidality. However, as Jane M. Ussher writes in The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience, diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses such as PTSD and C-PTSD, major depression, borderline personality disorder, or even schizophrenia rooted in women’s experience of sexual violence “medicalises women’s misery and again positions the problem within the women, whose ‘reasonable responses to trauma’, in the words of Sam Warner, are decontextualized as psychiatric ‘symptoms.’” Though she recognizes that diagnosis is useful, Ussher advocates for examining the social and political systems that lead to sexual trauma, rather than labeling traumatized women as “sick”. As I’ve discovered through my writing, my forays into prose poetry and lyric essay, my mind is beyond medicalization, a blue juggernaut glorious in its wild difference. Though broken, I am whole.
Yet, still, I suffer: When I revisit traumatic memories of self-harm and sexual assault and suicide attempts, I feel disconnected from my body and surroundings, as if what happened to me wasn’t real, an experience of depersonalization that feels as if you’re observing your life and the events from afar rather than being an active participant. I experience depersonalization and another dissociative symptom called derealization, which involves feelings of unreality or of being detached from your surroundings. In his seminal work, Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation, Nonsuicidal Self-injury, and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, first published in 1987, A.R. Favazza writes of the relationship between violence and self-violence: “Rather than suffer passively from some fantasized attack, cutters take control and mutilate themselves… cutting helps patients distinguish between reality and fantasy, between what is “inside” and what is “outside”. As a teenager, I thought of myself as taking control of my own pain, even titrating it, by self-harming, and making my own emotional pain physical, in a sense “realizing” my emotional pain.
In the fugue world that is dissociation, we “cutters” dream and dream, at times even experiencing reality as a dream. Until we snap awake—
At the kiss of the prince’s blade.
The first separation of my mind from my body was the butcher’s blade I drew along my thigh, too dull to slice the skin, leaving only a scarlet mark fading into the happenstance and havoc of high school soccer practice the next day. I jerked down the shorts that rode up as I ran what Coach called “suicides”: up the field, touch the goal line, then down the field, touch the far goal line. I played right guard because my left foot was weak, but really, it wasn’t my foot that was weak but my mind. My growing artfulness with razors made me feel powerful, that I was overpowering my flesh as tides overpower sand.
Or maybe the butcher’s blade was the second separation of my mind from my body. Maybe the first came a couple years earlier, when I began punching my thighs with my fists. “Thunder thighs,” my soccer teammates laughed because my thighs curved, more muscular than the boys’, my whole body stacked into a house made of waves. I wanted to suck my body dry; make my ribs wishbone; cage my brain, too; make myself small, un-stormy, controllable. I just wanted to kiss a boy, a beautiful boy, kiss a beautiful boy un-freakishly, without my lips blowing and bubbling against his.
In those long-ago days, my childhood waning, I learned that no one would pay attention to scratches in the crooks of the knees, and that no teacher nor even a parent would see the scratches on my arms if I still sang in the choir on Sundays. If the cuts were deeper, then I should wear long sleeves. Blue jeans were useful for mopping up blood seeping out of fresh wounds.
As I discovered, it wasn’t hard to hide like this, this hiding in plain sight. I erased myself just like I used to erase myself around my childhood home, evaporating into thin air. To everyone else, I still seemed to be the micrometers-close-to-perfect girl, working so painstakingly at all her classes, challenging herself with five years of math in high school, including AP Calculus, even though she hated math, a future honors student at one of the best universities in the country. I hid behind an always bright smile, proffering it, what I gave the world in exchange for its inattention. Really, of course, I desperately wanted someone to pay attention, but that possibility was terrifying, too. And it never happened.
Instead, I slowly lost my mind, fragmenting all over the floor on which I fell so many times, bleeding and undone, my self-violence ferocious.
As a young woman, I was twice assaulted by intimate partners. When I once tried to leave his apartment and he wanted sex, a lover caught me by the arm, pulled me into bed, stripped off my clothes, and raped me. Seven years later, while manic, I went home from a club with a strange man; back at his condo, he sexually assaulted me.
Today, I blame myself.
Perhaps “the prince’s blade” embodies the sexual violence so many of us who self-harm have experienced. Early psychoanalytic literature viewed self-harm as “symbolic castration,” Favazza writes, a method of avoiding actual castration. In the 1930s, Sandor Radó, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, interpreted the fear of penetration by an object, or cutting, as “the wished for and feared penetration of the father,” according to Favazza. Of course, modern psychiatry, so focused on treatment of self-harm through psychotropics, has largely left behind psychoanalytic interpretations of the behavior, but there is a strong connection between sexual trauma and the development of non-suicidal self-injury. In a 2022 study, researchers traced a strong association between sexual assault and self-harm even greater than that between the behavior and other forms of trauma. Other researchers concluded in a 1995 study that there was a clear association between childhood sexual abuse and self-harm; this association was stronger among those subjected to more frequent and severe abuse.
The U.S. Justice Department reports that 91 percent of the victims of sexual assault and rape are female. Childhood sexual abuse is prevalent among both genders, but one in four girls under age 18 experience some form of sexual violence, as compared to one in seven boys, according to researchers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given these statistics, women are twice as likely to self-harm as men, and Forbes reports that teenage girls self-harm at three times the rate of boys. Women and girls are more prone to self-harm because, “poor mental health among women and girls is often closely linked to violence and abuse, such as experience of physical abuse from a partner, sexual abuse as a child or sexual abuse as an adult,” said Jemima Olchawski, the chief executive of the Alliance, a U.K.-based organization advocating for girls and women at risk, in The Guardian.
Perhaps we choose to penetrate ourselves with steel because we were penetrated against our will by men. We become agents of our own pain.
Our larger culture rarely discusses how women who self-harm experience motherhood. But it is an experience—and far more common than the average person is aware. After all, the millions of teenage girls who self-harm grow up.
A Quora user asks, “If I self-harm (cutting) while pregnant, can it harm the baby?”
“Tricky question,” a person who identifies herself as a registered nurse answers. “Unless you accidentally nick an artery, than [sic] no. However, the bigger question is why do you self-harm & will the things that drive you to do it put you in danger of being neglectful or abusive to your baby?”
When I first started self-harming—by burning—I told myself I was “cauterizing the evil.” I still think of myself as “broken,” as “bad” and “damaged.” I fear my own rage, my own violence—
And I fear targeting my child.
Yes, those are the fears going through my mind again and again: What if I had to be hospitalized multiple times? Would my child remember that, carry that all her life? When I sobbed around my child—as I know I would—would she feel the need to take care of me, our roles reversed?
Would I scar my child, as I have scarred my own body?
I wonder if I can truly leave the past behind.
The Friday evening after my menstrual cycle resumes, my husband and I are out for sushi on the date night we kept up even during the pandemic, keep up even now, five and a half years into marriage. This evening, we lean towards each other across steaming bowls of udon soup, white ceramic gleaming under the restaurant’s twinkle lights, band members assembling a drum set in the corner. I stare deep into my husband’s soft brown eyes, as he reaches across the table to take my hand and says, “Things are going to get real tonight.”
“Oh my god, yes!” I exclaim. “I’m excited and scared—both.”
He delicately runs his fingers up and down my left forearm, absentmindedly tracing the old, raised scars that line the skin. My body is one big scar, I think. “I love you, Meggie,” he says. “We’re in this together.”
My husband trusts me—that I will not engage in self-harm. But once during our marriage, I’ve harmed myself, slicing my thigh with scissors after catching sight of my overweight body in a dressing room mirror. It’s the only time I’ve self-harmed in the past nine years. Believing that when I harm my own body, I’m harming my marriage, I haven’t forgiven myself.
Despite the ways I’ve betrayed our love, later we will clamber into my husband’s cobalt Equinox, blue of the car reflecting the blue of an evening sky flaring with the last remnants of light, and we will head home, where my husband will lay me down upon the sheets so gently, so gently. And he will make love to me and the single scar that is my body with his body.
And I will dream in the face of fear.
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