"If you have no wounds how can you know if you're alive?

_{Vanessa Beecroft Pissing}

If you have no scar how do you know who you are? Have been? Can ever be?"
As spoke by Edward Albee in The Play About the Baby

For the benefit of your analysis, and in the effort to understand myself better, here are some of the emotional, physical and mental scars with which I have been blessed.

A. I am in pre-school. It is Christmas time. We have made lumpen Christmas figures of clay and painted them red and white. We have glued cotton on them for snow and beards. We are told to leave them on the table so they can dry. After school we return to pick up our lumpen figures and take them home. Mine is gone. I am heart broken as I was really proud of my clay santa. My mom tells me to just take another one.

B. Age 12. My mom has nervous breakdown #1. There are many painful moments related to this incident, but the one that stands out for me today (or that is, the one I have not yet picked to death) is when the principal, Sister Margaret, calls me into her office. Sister Margaret was a mean, wrinkly nun with a giant bosom who had until that moment only yelled at me in Church and on the playground. Concern was not a characteristic she wore well. I remember staring at the brass placard on her desk unable to meet her gaze as she asked me if there was anything wrong...at home.

C. High School. This was another low point for my family. My dad, with whom I had spent many of my childhood hours in the unemployment office, was now gainfully employed in television. The downside of this, was that it meant he had a bad 80's cocaine habit. One morning I woke him up so that he could drive me and my girlfriend to school. As usual, I brought him his coffee (milk and sugar), but even I had to admit, he looked pretty bad. When he finally stumbled outside, still high as a kite, he walked up and down our street trying to figure out where he had parked his car. He never found it and we had to take the bus.

D. College. I am in Los Angeles for the summer, working for a youth-in-arts program and living with my mom. I discover I am pregnant by an ex-boyfriend who is many miles away. Apparently, that morning after pill that made me throw-up for 2 days did not do its job. The ex claims he has no money to help pay for the abortion nor can he afford to come out for it. I insist he borrow money from his boss so he can at least TAKE THE GODDAMN BUS. A couple of weeks later, I pick him up at the bus stop, drive us to the clinic, pay for the abortion myself and refuse to speak to him the entire time he is there. The following semester at school, I take a book making class and make a cloth book that is the story of the abortion. I sew 15 copies of this book (a requirement of the class is to make an edition) which is actually more like a small quilt. It takes me weeks to make all of them, listening to NPR the entire time, hearing the same news stories over and over, and pricking my fingers repeatedly. Everyone in the class got one of these things and I always wondered how they felt about it. One guy in the class told me it made him and his girlfriend cry because they thought they were pregnant once.