Ring Finger

by Brooke Laufer

In the middle of March when we had our first warm day of the year, I felt inspired and put on my garden gloves to do some work in the yard. Almost immediately I felt a terrible pain in my finger. I whipped off the gloves and a bee flew out of the left one, fell to the ground and promptly died. It had stung me underneath my wedding ring.

My finger was throbbing and instantly started swelling. I iced it and took Advil. And I drank wine. But the next morning it still throbbed and my finger was huge. For the previous five years, since my first pregnancy, I hadn’t been able to take the ring off (a beautiful antique with diamonds and sapphires, chosen by my husband some 10 years earlier), and now that I had been stung, the ring was cutting off all circulation and I was losing sensation in my finger. I went to a jeweler and asked them to cut off the ring. They told me to go straight to the Emergency Room, which I didn’t want to do, as it seemed an overreaction and I was busy with work. So I called Robert, my Polish handyman friend, who came over with several tools. He worked and sweated over my finger for a while, the ring now embedded in swollen skin. I was in a great deal of pain and several times cried out while he cut at the white gold band, even though he worked gently. Finally the ring snapped in half and fell to the floor.

My husband was quite upset about what had happened. He thought I should have gone to the ER, and was hurt and miffed by how the ring was “hacked off so thoughtlessly”. I suggested he have the ring fixed as my birthday gift. He was insulted by that idea and we fought, as was so consistent for our marriage. The ring, in its pieces, sat in a ziplock bag in his desk drawer.

Later that year, as my 40th birthday came around, he surprised me by having the ring fixed and resized so that I could wear it again. The jeweler called me when the ring was finished and left me a message letting me know it was in their safe waiting for me. It took several more weeks before I finally retrieved the ring and put it back on my finger.

One week after I had gotten the ring back I was getting the kids out of the car, waiting for them to shuffle out of their car seats, I suddenly felt tremendous pain in my left hand as the car door slammed shut on it. I had to use my right hand to open the door again and release my left hand. It was my ring finger, with the newly repaired ring on it, throbbing and swelling fast. Again, I put it on ice and took Advil. And drank wine.

I went grocery shopping. Unable to use my left hand, the cashier asked me if I was ok. I told her what had happened. About the bee sting too. Her eyes widened and she told me about a book, Are you My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. There's a chapter in that book, she said, about how physical injuries are signs from our unconscious mind.

Now I was getting curious about the connection between both ring finger experiences. I got home and searched my inbox for an email I had sent to my friend describing the day the bee had stung me, in search of important details I may have forgotten. In the search results was an email that had been returned to me from my mother with the subject line:

“A message I did not get”

That was an email I had sent to my mom months earlier, but it never made it to her, some strange email glitch. I opened the email and read my own description about how I was feeling better about my marriage in the past few days. I also mention how the bee stung me, how my finger was quite swollen and how I was thinking I’d get the ring cut off. I wrote how I was looking forward to having it cleaned and fixed, since it had been dull and damaged for a while.

From my current perspective, it was hard to ignore the connection between my damaged ring, and my troubled marriage. It was right there.

Later that evening I called my husband while icing my finger and drinking wine. I told him about my finger getting shut in the car door and the possibility I’d need to cut the ring off again. He laughed nervously and made a joke about throwing the ring in Lake Michigan. I laughed too.

We talked for a long time. He came home and we made love. The swelling went down that night. In the morning it was clear I would not need to get the ring cut off. It seemed I had found a better way to respond to my damaged marriage.