3 hours ago
4
I am standing in the middle of the boxing ring, a stage lit up like a theatre. I’ve hit the woman so hard she staggers back into the ropes. The pause makes me relax. I think I’ve won, but I’m wrong. Rage moves her. Boxing can be like a game of chess, a play on stillness and control. But not now, and not here. I am scrappy and wild. When she comes for me, I launch myself at her. My face can take this pounding – it’s been thickened by temper and that’s enough. Then she hits me and my legs buckle and my head spins. There is the thud of silence as I scramble for sense – but it’s over. My body is done.
I started boxing soon after my mum died. It had been a long and brutal three years of watching the tumour take over, edging closer to her throat. It happened during Covid, so visiting her in the hospice felt clandestine and sneaky – we’d stalk the silent wards in masks, hands raw with sanitiser, scared to touch each other. I nursed and helped her to the end. I witnessed how the mechanisms of her body stopped working. I watched Mum stop eating because her body wouldn’t let her swallow. Bedsores stopped her sleeping. She needed extra blankets to stop the mattress causing her pain.
It was the slowness of it. I saw the cancer break her to nothing, her body fade and fall away to nothing but a ghost. The pain of it, too, the endless morphine and her dreadful sleeps that always looked as if she’d died. I had to clean and feed her, and witness how reduced she felt by this. All her power and the magic and the force of her turned to a ghoulish stillness; her sentences broken, breathless and rasping. The tumour even took her voice in the end.
Grief was thick and unmanageable. I was desperate to find a way to get to some other side, to actualise the pain and rage I felt. I found it in boxing. Or boxing found me. I was waiting for my daughter to finish dance class when I saw the fighters swagger into the building. They were beautiful. When I asked what was going on, their trainer asked if I wanted to fight, too. I said yes. It made sense. My grandfather had been a boxer, my daughter’s father also. Boxing had always been there.
I was often angry. I spent my 20s trying to soothe myself with all kinds of self-harm: truancy, drugs, fights, cutting. Mum would sit with me and hold my hand until dawn, until clarity and sleep. She made it better. She was kind, so patient, waiting for me to understand myself.
I didn’t go to school for a while, I truanted, I wasted everyone’s time. Those tired teachers and my broken-hearted parents. I was a teenager in the 90s and hung around with boys in bands. We flocked around all that indie sleaze, our currency based on how thin and pretty we could be. Always so grateful to be on the list, or backstage, I reduced myself, dangling a Marlboro Light and holding my tongue, tiny and quiet in stilettos. Desperate to be a body they would desire. Desperate that I would be chosen. I didn’t consider sex as something I could enjoy as well.
When things felt too much, like a bad relationship getting worse, I cut marks into my arm. They will never go away. The gloss-pink scabs have faded to scraggy ghosts, curled and white, but they never vanish.
Motherhood stopped this. My body belonged to my daughter, so I took better care of it. When I became a single mother I was even more aware of how I held myself in front of her, the way my daughter saw me walk into rooms. How she saw me talked to by men, what I did with my myself. I always try to hide the scars from her. Or I lie. They are the thing I can never get rid of.
Boxing felt like the opposite of self-harm. The bruises were a way of showing up for myself – and my daughter. They helped me take care of myself. It gave me space to rearrange patterns, to turn grief into bruises that came and went. The hurt and the healing was clean, simple.
My fight was violent. My friends tell me afterwards that it wasn’t nice to watch me fold and sway and fall. But they also tell me how good it was to see me hold myself tall again, to find my corner and walk out of the ring.
I had looked to where my daughter was sitting. I knew she was watching from somewhere in the dark and I knew she had to watch me walk out like I was fine and owned my body. She had to see me strong, able. I was concussed, but she didn’t know that. She thought I was smiling at her.
Afterwards, when I looked in the mirror, I saw my face in all its bashed-in glory. I saw the damage done. Things blurred, but the jagged whips on my face, where the glove caught my face, were precise and definite, as if I’d done it with makeup, the markings of a real fight. My purple mouth busted to a beautiful, plummy smile, the cracked eye and scuffed forehead stinging with scrapes.
I took out the braids and my hair stayed stiff, frazzled and crimped down my shoulders, which were still sticky with sweat. My arms so muscled and big in the black Everlast top I wore for this fight, a cut to my left shoulder blade – I was bigger than I had ever been. I felt pumped and silky in black.
My body had power. I felt strong, something cosmic, magical, even though the fight ended with so much drama and hurt. Especially because the fight ended with so much drama and hurt. I ran red lipstick over my mouth, careful not to touch the places where the skin had cut.
I often wonder what Mum would have made of me boxing. When she sat and held my hand and asked me why I had to keep hurting myself, would she see this as more of the same? But there was a moment when she was a day from death, her body so out of breath and her chest barely rising, when she grabbed my hand and told me I was strong. She told the nurse I was strong. She sat up to say it.
I think she would wince at the bruises, the same way I would if I saw my daughter’s face patched blue and brown. But she would love that I was standing with such certainty through my life without her, walking into a new power, all that temper harnessed, finally. I imagine her at the fights, sitting close to the ring, telling me to keep going. She appears in dreams and doorways, too, making sure I keep living.
I had to go to an extreme place to get better. I took fighting as far as I could. Now I have found a place that feels peaceful, where I can pause. I have allowed myself to be in love and to enjoy all its softness. My mum’s absence is a reality I am learning to get used to. This is the world without her. I am living again.
I make life happen for my daughter. My body is her body, too. She is now 10, and graceful and beautiful and strong, as if she has gathered all the best parts of her ancestry, an elegant toughness from all the women before her. I watched her navigate a group of noisy teenage boys playing football last week. She sailed through them with a calm confidence that the space was hers just as much as it was theirs.
She came with me to get my nails done last week. They are long and acrylic and the colour of gunpowder, gold stars on my ring finger. It means punching will feel less comfortable in gloves. Perhaps I had to give my departure from fighting its own ceremony. The fake nails feel like some ending: I was supposed to fight next month, and now I can’t.
Boxing was scaffolding. It held me together so I could heal, become bigger, louder. It gave me an armour – it let me get to that next bit of grief. I had to go to the hardest place to know how I could be soft again. To know how to live without mum holding my hand when life felt impossible. It will always be the thing that saved me, even if I don’t fight again. I was always strong: boxing helped me to remember this.
However, it wasn’t always this way. I remember when I couldn’t shadow-box. I was too embarrassed and awkward to move around the ring on my own, uncomfortable to be so exposed and so on show. I’d try to do it in a corner of the gym so I wouldn’t be seen. My trainer would have to get me back to the middle of the floor, make me face myself in the mirror.
The first few spars I had would cause me such anxiety, not because I was going to be hurt, but because I was going to get looked at. I didn’t know how to be seen when I wasn’t trying to be pretty. Boxing moved me into a new space where I could. Brutal and beautiful, boxing let me be angry. A new kind of makeup and face – the stripes across my nose and the bruised eye; the swollen, plump lip. I knew it was confrontational and touched nerves around women and violence. But I loved being so brazenly and openly ugly, I chose it and enjoyed it without shame. The real violence was holding my tongue and shrinking, not the black eye or busted nose.
Fighting allowed me to bring my body to a place where being hurt was a kind of vitality and a reassuring pattern I could be held safely in: if I hurt, then I would surely heal, too. It changed my relationship to pain. I always got better, every time, every week. Healing was as inevitable as the scrape or break.
My body also became my mother’s body, the pop of a new bruise a reminder of her. I was getting better for both of us.
I am now able to hold my body in the world without a boxing ring. I still have my shoulders, too big for the dresses in my wardrobe. And I still have the nose, a little fattened from punches. And I can still make a fist.
I am proud of this body, of its size and shape and history. I will always know I did it and could do it, and my body was so good at healing itself.
Soft Tissue Damage by Anna Whitwham is published by Rough Trade at £14.99 on 27 March. To preorder a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com
