Still Uncircumcised

Many of my childhood memories center around horses. They were my escape, not because I was particularly obsessed with horses. And they were easier to understand than most people.

There was Cheyenne, red with flaxen mane and tail. She was a Shetland pony that looked like every version of a fantasy. She carried me all over the place, good-natured and eager to please, until I sadly outgrew her. Dusty, the gray Shetland with the black mane and an eel stripe down his back, was naughty. The kind of pony that ran straight and veered off to the side. He taught me how to stay on because, well, there were many times that I didn’t. Stay on, that is.

JD, the strawberry roan my older brother trained, was a solid horse with basic training and an eagerness to please. April, the bay, with a gorgeous blanket across her haunches had an overwhelming anxiety about people. A fear the two of us shared, but she never learned to cover up with funny jokes or by becoming indispensable by just working harder than everyone else.

But the one I loved most was the tri-color paint mare with long legs and the ability to move with me like we shared a mind. Lady was a yearling when we got her, and she became my responsibility to train, to guide... She became an extension of me. She was reliable, fast, and quiet when the world was loud.

When I say she was fast, I mean that she was faster than JD, on the rare occasions I could get my brother to go riding with me. One fall afternoon, we went into the neighbor’s property, through the tree-lined creek bed, up the winding gulch, and up toward the stone ring that told me there had once been a very different family living on the hill looking over our house.

On that day, I was eager to prove how fast Lady was. We raced up that hill to the road that wound around the sagebrush hills next to a sluggish canal. A road barely wide enough for two horses to ride, side by side, and a wicked S curve left by the FDR project that created the Project, bringing irrigation water to a semi-arid landscape and turning dirt farmers into conglomerates that grew soy and wheat and corn and sorghum. Thousands of gallons of water flowed through those canals and seeped through porous soil, creating bogs and swamps and mosquito-infested ponds surrounded by spearmint and cottonwood trees.

That S-curve was my undoing as we raced around it, my body pressed flat to her neck, mane whipping my face. Just a couple of feet in front of JD, my brother crouched on his back, but we were winning.

As we entered the curve, I realized we were too close to the edge as crumbling soil dislodged under our hooves and we slid, left side to the bank, into the water. The sudden change of momentum threw my body up and, as Lady threw her head up to the right to compensate, I was thrown to the left.

And that’s when her prominent eye bone connected, dead center, with my forehead.

Off flew my new gold, wire-framed glasses. Glasses I’d finally been able to pick for myself. Glasses that I wasn’t supposed to be wearing to ride. The large, oval brown frames I’d worn like some sort of teenage owl because Mom thought they looked good on me were innocently on my dresser. The new glasses? Well, they sank to the bottom of the canal as I held to the saddle and Lady regained her footing and surged to the top of the bank, back onto that little road.

“My glasses!!!” I yelled, completely in a panic.

I was in so much trouble. So. Much. Trouble. I frantically looked around for them, but a hefty astigmatism and not insignificantly nearsighted eyeballs were no match for the murky water and the distance. Wet hair slapped my face as I turned around to ask Bill to help me.

“Heidi. Umm. Are you ok?”

Even his voice sounded pale.

“Um, your head. Is your head ok?”

I had no idea what he was talking about until I reached up and found it.

A golf ball-sized dent. A divot, if you will, directly in the center of my forehead.

Glasses were completely forgotten. I was 16. Now, in addition to all the ways that I was weird, I was deformed. Horribly.

I’d have to wear bangs. The heavy kind that covers your face and hides pimples. For the rest of my life.

And in a house where, as a woman, you weren’t allowed to cut your hair? That was going to be a tough sell.

I don’t remember much about getting back to the house, but Bill got me settled. I assume he took care of the horses, too.

I sat alone on that slick, velvet, brown floral couch, looking into the frameless beveled mirror and envisioning the end of my life as I knew it. The only answer was homeschool, bangs, and complete social isolation.

Mom rarely took my injuries seriously, so I wasn’t surprised when I was told to just wait until Dad got home. That gave me hours to ponder my loss of freedom and be humiliated.

I was 16 and had a very vivid imagination. Those were very long hours.

Dad got home, took one look at his daughter with a spreading bruise, an obvious blow to the head, and promptly took me to the ER.

Following some basic exams, an evaluation by the ER doctor, and the assessment that, against all odds, I was, somehow, going to be ok? The doctors and nurses made me feel even worse by laughing their heads off and asking if the horse was ok.

Oh... Lady. I felt awful that I hadn’t checked her out at all. I kept my fingers crossed. Poor girl. It wasn’t her fault. I just left her. She was fine.

They sent me home with Tylenol.

Somewhere in between crafting my letter of intent to join a convent and considering new hairstyles, Bill had gone back to the canal and felt around in the water until he found my glasses. They were always a little crooked after that, but, well, why wouldn’t they be?

There needed to be a follow-up appointment. They’d never encountered such an accident in the Billings ER. The only recommendation they had was to suggest a follow-up in the next week with an Ear, Nose, Throat doctor. I went later that week with my mom.

As the days passed since the time of the accident, my forehead bone somehow returned to a more normal space, and, other than excruciating headaches for a couple of days, I seemed to be recovering. Still, the appointment had been made, and we should at least see what he had to say.

X-rays took up the center of the ENT doctor’s desk. My entire head filled the image. I could see the bone healing in an arc between my eyebrows and the shadow of sinuses behind it. I carefully touched the soft space where firm bone had always been before. It felt a bit like a baby’s soft spot.

“Well, I can see the fracture, but fortunately, Heidi has pretty large sinuses, and it seems that the bone is largely healing on its own with very little disfigurement. However, if we were to repair the damage completely, there are a couple of options.

The first option would be to cut along the hairline, pull the forehead down, re-break the bone, insert a metal plate, and then put it back together. Now, that runs the risk of damaging the nerves in the skin and could cause some drooping of the forehead. The second option would be to shave her head to the middle part and make the cut there, pull it all forward, and commence with the plate and such.”

Words cannot express how much I did NOT want to have either option. The convent was sounding better and better.

My mom looked at me, “Heidi, do you think you need this?”

“No, Mom! I think I’m fine. Look, it doesn’t look like much at all! It’s healing just fine on its own!”

And that was that. No surgery. No metal plates. No Shar Pei forehead. No shaved head mullet.

That was 1989.

In 1992, in a crowded restaurant, surrounded by a group of teenagers I’d just traveled to Mexico with and my brother with his new girlfriend, my mother decided to regale us with tales of Heidi’s woes and struggles. For reasons we have never been able to discover, this was the story she chose to tell.

In the 1950s, Mom had taken most of a course to become a Licensed Practical Nurse. She met and married my dad before she could graduate, but the feeling of confidence and pride she had from being nearly a medical professional never left her. This was largely why she would evaluate my various injuries and make decisions that often had delayed medical care or disregarded issues.

It also heavily informed her deep mistrust of the medical profession in general.

On that Sunday afternoon, with the hustle and bustle of the after church crowd and the smell of fish and chips, surrounded by family and new friends I desperately wanted to impress, my mother began to discuss, loudly and in detail, the words of the ENT doctor in Billings. With one minor, yet profound, difference.

In the version told by Eva, the doctor wanted to cut my foreskin, peeling it forward to insert a metal plate in my head.

As we tried to get her to stop talking, she even more loudly asserted that foreskin was the technical and medically correct term for forehead skin. Dad tried to get her to stop.

She got louder.

We were howling. She got louder and louder.

Foreskin. Foreskin. Foreskin.

We laughed harder. There were tears.

I wanted to die. And yet, I couldn’t stop laughing at the same time. I don’t think I ever saw those Mexico trip kids again. But the girlfriend stuck around and even married my brother anyway. What can I say? We were entertaining?

How do you recover from that? I have never been so embarrassed in my life.

In the end, all things considered, I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear that 32 years later, I remain uncircumcised, my forehead intact.

Just as God intended.

And, in case you wondered? The skin on your forehead is called your "facial skin”.

I had to check, too.