Shine On, Shiner

I have a damn doozy of a black eye right now.

It has taken me forty-four years to get a shiner. Considering my inability to not run my mouth and my overall lack of coordination, it is fairly miraculous that it has taken me more than four decades to get one.

I got my black eye by tripping on an untied shoelace and smacking my right eye-brow bone on a barbell during a workout. It didn’t hurt that badly when I did it. In fact, I finished the workout before I checked on it. By the time I made it to the mirror it had puffed up like a Peep in the microwave. In the ensuing days, it swelled, deflated and turned a variety of shades of black, purple, blue, green and yellow.

The night it happened my husband said, “Well, I guess, we’re not going anywhere together until that bruise heals?”

“Wait! Why? I don’t care. Are you embarrassed by me?”

“No, Sosha. I think you’re a cute little bruiser, but I know how it happened. Strangers will just assume that I hit you.”

When he said it, it seemed utterly ridiculous to me that anyone would ever think that of him. My husband is the best kind of man, a good, honorable, patient man. He is comfortable in his masculinity and his skin. During my most insecure, scared, hateful times, I have said vicious things to him, goading him to prove that there weren’t actually any good men, any good people. He, as he is wont to do, proved me wrong.

When the hot water stung my puffy eye in the shower that night, I thought about my mom and the many black eyes that she endured at the hands of men, of her triangular bottle of Cover Girl foundation that she used to try to cover it up and of her ever present aviators that she inevitably turned to when her cheap make up didn’t do the trick. I remembered the shame that I felt any time my mom’s blue eyes, the ones that danced like summer’s first fireflies, faded to black at the hands of the men who were supposed to be by her side for better or worse, but simply just became the worst. I remembered knowing that when my mom’s face was bruised and battered that she would soon find an excuse to take a thick leather belt to the back side of my body because abuse begets abuse.

Then I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me, took a deep look in my good eye and my beat-up one and silently thanked the universe for the type of life where black eyes come from being a klutz, where your husband is your friend and protector and where your daughter doesn’t know that being whipped with a belt is something that she should ever be worried about.

Staring at my discolored and garish eye in that foggy mirror, I was thankful for this shiny shiner of a life.

This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.

Soshally Awkward

Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.