Do you know where your bruises come from?

I don't.

I wake up every morning with blue marks on my legs that look like the ominous shadows of fingerling potatoes, bullet tip sized green irises on my arms, the centers of the eyes of impact, now bloodshot and firm to the touch in my jelly like flesh.

The daily humiliations of having my hair ripped out by tiny, lovable, chubby fists: the flop of extra skin from the pregnancy that still hangs from my abdomen some 37 weeks after the babe entered the world; the unrecognizable nips on the end of these new, incredibly important tits I own, as long as a fingertip and as pink and unfeeling as a pencil eraser except when nipped by newly budding teeth, when they blossom with crimson crescent tooth marks, accompanied with sharp intakes of breath, and my resounding cry of "no!"

Now these daily tribulations are added to with the discovery that I am receiving beatings of which I am unaware. I must be, or else where would these shadows on my shins be coming from?

So too are these shadows in my brain. These uncomfortable blooms of suspicion and misery, that like these small indigo spots on my skin, show up after some unobserved, small act of violence.

Is this postpartum depression?

I have recently decided to leave facebook for a while.
I always feel so lame saying things like that (as though anyone should care that I am no longer participating in a meaningless system of message boards and overproduced note passing).
To me, the site had always been a source of life news from those friends I couldn't imagine calling and catching up with, but whose lives had briefly intersected with mine, and so I wanted to know how they were doing, what color they had decided to paint their bathrooms, and how many bowls of rice crispies they could eat at four in the morning.
And up until recently, that was great.
Even as I watched the site itself metamorphose into a weird bot. The "personalized" ads stolen from my amazon wish list, or the tailored clickbait in the margins harvesting vocabulary from my own statuses, were not enough to deter me. This is the future, I would shrug, and carry on, blissfully ignorant that my brain was not only being harvested, but implanted as well.

I'll make no arguments against the fact that tragedy is constantly happening somewhere.
It always has been.
As a child, my father received three daily newspapers (five on Sundays!), and he almost always snarfed his dinner down so he could get to the television and watch the six thirty news.
He was a journalist though, so it made sense to me that he wanted to be abreast of global news and events. I used to join him for as long as I could stand it, my head resting in the crook of his elbow, my eyes trained on the gritty, pixelated images of Princess Diana visiting AIDS victims in Africa, or Boris Yeltsin visiting troops in Russia. I usually had to leave at the ten minute mark because it just got too sad.
There was too much hunger and starvation, too much violence and destruction. It seemed like every other country in the world was at war, and in the U.S. and Canada, there were more urban examples of warfare, like pipe bombs, school shootings, serial child abduction, murder, and rape.
I turned away from the news, and in my head, I called myself a coward.
A real adult would be able to face the truth, I thought sullenly.
A grown up sees the world in all its misery, and accepts it, acknowledges what is beyond her control, and then helps the best she can, and goes to bed knowing she did her best and sleeps the sleep of the just. A coward can't stomach the actuality of the world. She runs away before they show the image of the crime scene. She hides in books and fairy tales. She listens to the radio because somehow, listening to terrible things is easier than watching them, and she goes to sleep at night fretting that she isn't making anything better at all.

Now as an adult in my own time period, I don't have cable or a subscription to a single newspaper, but  I have a facebook page and a twitter account, and I have twenty four hour access to global catastrophes whether I want it or not.

Only I didn't notice before.
Somehow, I was able to read the daily bits and pieces, and let them go.
Then I became a mother, and -out of nowhere- everything stuck.

That picture of the Syrian child covered in dust and blood after a bombing, sitting shell shocked in the back of an ambulance? It showed up in my newsfeed seven times in 24 hours posted by seven different people. Just when I'd managed to get the poor child's stunned eyes out of my mind, there he was again, looking hopelessly out into a world that for him moments before made sense and was now unrecognizable, his entire life shattered in a matter of seconds over a disagreement between people he had never met, and doesn't understand.

Newsclips about the earhtquake in Italy started playing before I knew what they were, slideshowing me images of people being pulled out of ruined buildings and rubble. Their bodies mangled, their hair matted with plaster and stone dust. Text scrolled across the screen explaining that an eight month old boy and his 7 year old brother were found dead in their home after the steeple of a church collapsed on it.

An article began circulating talking about the planet and its inevitable, accelerated path to destruction. I couldn't bear to read it, just the tagline gave me nightmares.

And I started discovering fear, like those bruises, the day after, showed up in my mind with the same mysterious origins. I had forgotten all the articles, all the photographs, but they had left an impression, and the shape of the tragedies was showing up in my sudden fear of strangers, and traveling, and long car rides, and crowded places, and my mistrust of unwashed fruit, mosquito bites, certain fabrics, and brands of shampoo. I used to be one of those people who dropped her potato chip on the floor, picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without a care in the world. Now I stared at my bathroom ceiling wondering if a bomb would collapse it on top of us where should I place the baby's seat so that he would receive the least of the damage?

So I am turning away.
I am taking a break.
I am calling it a media detox.
And I am perfectly fine with admitting that I am a coward.
I AM TERRIFIED.

But I cannot teach my child to live his life in fear.
And I am afraid that I am starting to live mine that way.
Because I am afraid.
I am too much afraid.
And I still don't know where the bruises come from.