What is a face?
A memoir of childhood trauma and healing
Picking through the shattered memories of being hit by a car at age 5, author Marcia Meier wonders, what is truth and what is fabrication?
In this wrenching memoir, Meier has pieced together the events of that morning of June 17, 1961, in Muskegon, Michigan: crossing the intersection in front of her family home, while pushing her brand new cherry-red two wheeler, she was struck by a car and dragged 200 feet under the carriage. The young girl was left severely disfigured — traumatized by repeated surgeries throughout her childhood, with the added pain of being ostracized, bullied at school and isolated emotionally
Her memoir lays bare the trauma of the wounded child. Healing will require decades of trying to take back her story — claim it as her own.
“After the accident,” Meier writes, “my identity became that of a scarred child, a person whose face repulsed people. It wasn’t long before I knew myself as someone to be avoided, knew that my face was frightening, even for adults.”
No one believes the abused child (and only later, as an adult, does her therapist assure her that she has indeed been abused). “We told you never to cross the street without looking,” her mother insists, but the girl had looked both ways. It turns out (in court) that the elderly driver of the vehicle that struck her was blind in the left eye, and did not see the child crossing the road.
The 15 operations between the ages of 5 and 9 by noted plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Kislov inflicted unimaginable pain on the child — “for her own good” — involving having her arms tied down to the crib-bed to keep her from touching the skin grafts; waking up blindfolded and not knowing where she was; enduring excruciating bandage changes; watching her mother leave her hospital room at night and fearing abandonment.
The child’s pain was not validated. If she cried, she was told there was nothing to cry about, nothing to hurt about, nothing to be afraid of. Dr. Kislov was a godlike figure, and she had no choice, no control over what was being done to her. Being bullied at her private Catholic school was apparently discarded by her parents — they were not malevolent people, but busy with a houseful of other children and trying to run a dry cleaning business.
As a result, Meier ended up not trusting her own experience: “Why would I put credence in what my own eyes, my own heart, told me?”
Meier, a California-based journalist, writing coach and author of several books (e.g. “Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After 50,” 2018), works though her tangled memories in chapters headed by specific surgeries in the 1960s and early 1970s performed by Kislov to repair Meier’s left eye, cheek and chest. These attempt to ground the narrative in some kind of fact, while memories of her chilly, unreachable mother are more fluid — why did her mother seem to respond more warmly to her other three children? Was she resentful of the time and cost Meier’s surgeries demanded? Resentful of her daughter’s close relationship with her father?
Meier grew up in a time when people did not offer psychological or emotional support to children who were hospitalized with traumatic injuries. Over the years she rejects her family’s punishing faith, assumes that no man will want to touch her and essentially distrusts intimate relationships. Tragically, she could not imagine a future for herself further than the next surgery.
Over time, she unlearns everything — embraces journalism as a profession, gets married and adopts a child, finds healing and a sense of agency through therapy and yoga. And, while caring for her aged mother in her last years of life, forgives her.
“Little by little,” Meier writes, “I am becoming who I was meant to be.”