Pain Like Laundry
Jacqlyn Cope
My mother taught me to fold pain up like laundry: flatten the surface, crisp the corners, and store it away in a drawer or a cabinet.
As I stood in line at the chow hall in Afghanistan during my 2012 deployment, I thought of her. The men in front of me smelled of dirt and sweat; I pulled my tan T-shirt up to my nose and smelled the same. I tried so hard to remember the scent of her Chanel N5. The powdery clean sophistication of the perfume that stuck inside the threads of her jacket that I wrapped my 4-year-old self in while she was at work. I wished I had a bottle to spray myself down.
I’d sneak into her bathroom sometimes, look above the counter on my tippy-toes, and blindly try to grab at the bottles and hair products organized there. I’d feel the squareness of the black cap of the bottle and would drag it along the porcelain counter top, creating a sound that made me stop every now and then because I though I might get caught. It would finally reach the edge and my small hand could grab hold of the whole thing.
The amber color of the perfume always reminded me of caramel. I would pull the cap off, examine the shiny gold of the spritzer and see my reflection within it. I wouldn’t completely press down on the spring, only slightly, to run some of the smell over my wrists like I had seen my mother do.
Standing in the line, three men with beards, probably Special Forces, gave me a smile and raised their brows, laughing with one another. I ignored them and wished I could go back to the moment in my mother’s bathroom.
*
She was also on my mind when I flung my body on the ground during my first IDF attack. The beads of the rosary she had given me rolled between my fingertips rapidly in succession with the sounds of war. I laid belly down on the floor, knees throbbing, trying to squeeze all the religion out of the cross like a lemon. She had given me the rosary in the airport as something to keep me safe, but she didn’t know that there was more to war than just the rockets and IDF attacks. She didn’t know that I would have to push away the images of bloodied stumps of amputees, faces shredded by shrapnel, or the machines that sucked and pushed liquids into dying bodies. She didn’t know, but she had prepared me to lock all of that away for later.
My mother taught me to fold pain up like laundry: flatten the surface, crisp the corners, and store it away in a drawer or a cabinet.
It occurred to me during my 5 months stationed at Bagram AFB that I was more like my mother than I knew. She was a master of mastering her emotions, which I became too. I carry small fragments of memories where she took the brunt of our family’s emotional burden and kept going. Especially when my father became a paraplegic.
*
A herniated disk in my Father’s back had made a home for itself, growing rotund, its belly resting against his spinal cord until the pressure caused permanent damage. He was thirty-two years old and had to re-learn how not to shit or piss himself. Being reborn again so late in life, with paralysis from the waist down, took him and split him in the middle, a tree struck by lightening, half gone, half there.
They were both factory workers at an envelope packing company. She continued to work her shifts while he was in the hospital for six months. My sisters and I never saw her cry. I know now that crying meant facing her own pain, unfolding the laundry, and publicly admitting to everyone her fear, a weakness.
I was five years old when I went to see him. A nurse had pushed the door open to a room, and I could smell sickness seeping out. Curdled milk mixed with bleach, a sort of clean-rot. The clean-rot smell that all the patients I helped lift onto planes in Afghanistan were permeated with.
When you’re five there aren’t many things you remember, but I have distinctly linked spoiled milk and hospitals. I felt my stomach turn every time I had to load a patient onto a plane during a mission. It turned not only because of the smell, but because I was reliving the moment I saw my father in that hospital bed, and every other hospital visit he inevitably had to go through afterward. I thought of the lives of these men and women and what they would have to go through the rest of their lives, reliving and overcoming the moment of injury. I also thought about how I would do that too.
Would I be able to lock away the pain? I still have the vivid memory of my father that I can’t walk away from.
*
A hospital gown, untied at the top of his neck, revealed pale skin, tempered with a red rash, a rash bred from frustration. Dark circles set his eyes back, and he was unshaven with yellow-tinged skin. His voice cracked like a loudspeaker turning on or like one of those static devices that captures the voices of ghosts. I was unsure of him and didn’t step closer than the end of the rails by his feet.
“It’s okay. You can come give me a hug on the side over here.”
Tubes cascaded from the top of his hand, from his nose, and under his gown by his lap, like clear spaghetti. I pulled myself up next to him and hugged him, crunching some of the tubes between us.
My mother stood in the back of the room, watching. This moment in my mind is like a scene in a snow globe, where I am no longer a participant but an observer from afar. She crossed her arms and let the moment happen, and I never felt her quiver with sorrow or sadness. I wonder how hard it was to hold back everything that was building up inside her. Her tears must have become paperweights, too large to slip onto her cheeks.
I don’t remember feeling any one emotion. Maybe I was scared, or afraid of what was going to happen next. Or maybe since I can’t remember, it means my mother took all my feelings, my pain, and pulled them out like a cipher, filtering my experience. Or maybe I had learned to adapt already, folding my own piles of laundry, putting them away for later, allowing me to compartmentalize what I know now about war.
I can take out my pain on a pair of pants with my iron, starching my creases stiff, like the edge of a knife that can’t cut.
My mother taught me to fold pain up like laundry: flatten the surface, crisp the corners, and store it away in a drawer or a cabinet.
Jacqlyn Cope is an 8-year Air Force veteran. While writing this piece, she had to dive deeper than she has ever gone into the trauma of her PTSD. She hopes that it will help others tell their own stories. She worked as an aeromedical evacuation mission controller who decided to leave the military in 2016 to pursue her writing career and education. She has an MFA in creative writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University and is currently a 7th grade English teacher for LAUSD.