Neither Frank Slovak nor his wife, Mrs. Slovak, are strangers to trauma: Mrs. Slovak suffers a miscarriage prior to the events of “Flexion,” and Frank has a farming accident at the beginning of the story that leaves him permanently disabled. Though the couple has a troubled marriage and they’ve been alienated from each other for years, they have similar experiences as they suffer from their personal traumas: both are devastated and ashamed, and neither receives the individualized kinds of support that they desperately need from each other or from the community. As such, “Flexion” shows how trauma can be both physically and mentally destructive on an individual and how improper support can worsen the problem. The story makes the case that the best course of action in response to trauma is simply recognizing the sufferer’s pain, empathizing, and being openminded about how to offer effective support.
After Mrs. Slovak loses a pregnancy, a lack of emotional support means that she suffers much more than she needs to. After the miscarriage, Mrs. Slovak longs to be comforted by others and to talk openly about her trauma. But Frank’s attitude makes her feel anything but consoled or supported: he takes her to a hospital out of town so the local nurses won’t find out about the miscarriage, and he refuses to let any of the townspeople know about it either. Afterward, he’s adamant that “We’re putting this behind us,” forbidding either of them to discuss what happened. Unsurprisingly, this makes Mrs. Slovak feel ashamed and unable to move on, showing how a lack of support can worsen an already traumatizing situation. Indeed, Mrs. Slovak feels that she and Frank have become “beasts of burden” to the miscarriage, dragging the trauma around yet refusing to acknowledge it. As a result, after Frank is pinned under his overturned tractor and left partially paralyzed, Mrs. Slovak is resentful of how people look at her sympathetically and bring food and gifts to the Slovaks’ door. “And all for Frank, she thinks with bitterness. Frank, who'd rather cut off his own hand than be beholden to anyone […] who liked his privacy to the point of glowering, hostile secrecy.” Mrs. Slovak wishes she’d received people’s condolences when she’d had the miscarriage, since she—unlike Frank—would have appreciated it. In this case, brushing trauma under the rug makes Mrs. Slovak feel unsupported by her husband and also unable to receive support from others, compounding her pain to the extent that she’s still haunted and embittered by the loss many years after it occurred.
In the aftermath of his accident, Frank also experiences what it’s like to receive the wrong kind of support. Described as a lifelong “glutton for work,” Frank is someone who needs to feel like a provider: useful, capable, and respectable. But as a newly disabled person, Frank is unable to work on the farm or even to care for himself on a basic level. This is a traumatizing experience for Frank: even beyond his physical injuries, he’s devastated by his loss of agency, livelihood, and purpose. During this time, both Mrs. Slovak and their small, rural community step up to help Frank. Mrs. Slovak becomes his caretaker, while men in town repair Frank’s tractor, take the Slovaks’ lambs to market, bale up their hay, and even install a handicap-accessible shower and sink for the couple. While these gestures are ostensibly kind and helpful, they don’t have the intended effect on Frank. He’s adamant that “I’m not going to be a burden on anyone,” and the favors he receives make him feel like just that: infantilized and useless, like a charity case. As such, it’s clear that even well-intended gestures can worsen people’s trauma if it’s not the specific kind of support they need.
It’s not until the Slovaks finally open up to each other and offer a mutual recognition of each other’s suffering that they begin to feel adequately supported. Near the end of the story, Frank admits to Mrs. Slovak that he’d wanted to die under his tractor while Mrs. Slovak went to call the ambulance. “That’s what I could give you,” he says. Frank hoped to save Mrs. Slovak the pain of watching him suffer and then having to care for him if he survived, and thus, Frank’s reasoning for denying the miscarriage is also brought to light: he likely just wanted to make Mrs. Slovak’s trauma go away. With this small yet powerful revelation, Frank implicitly acknowledges how much Mrs. Slovak has suffered since losing her pregnancy and how afraid he is of adding to her pain. Just after this, Mrs. Slovak reflects on Frank’s accident and thinks that she “understands better than anyone […] the painful stretch of sinew, the crack of dislocation.” In other words, having experienced loss herself, she empathizes with Frank’s feelings of physical and emotional pain. Then, noticing that Frank is crying in bed next to her, she quietly reaches out and holds his hand rather than making any grand gesture to help him. In this moment, both of them seem comforted and at peace for the first time in many years. Thus, together, Frank’s candid admission and Mrs. Slovak’s simple yet significant show of solidarity demonstrate how often, the proper way to comfort someone isn’t ignoring their problems or making assumptions about what will help someone. Rather, effective support simply entails legitimizing the other person’s pain, offering a shoulder to lean on, and being open to what they need.
The story doesn’t offer tidy resolutions for Frank or Mrs. Slovak: when “Flexion” ends, both of them still have plenty of trauma to work through, and neither has definitively established how best to support the other. But given the newfound sense of clarity and cohesion that the Slovaks experience after acknowledging each other’s suffering for the first time, the story suggests that for traumatized people, simply being authentically seen—rather than fixed on other people’s terms—is what’s important.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Trauma and Support ThemeTracker
Trauma and Support Quotes in Flexion
The year she’d lost the baby, he’d driven her home from the hospital—the big hospital, half an hour away, so that not even the local nurses would know—and told her, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, ‘We’re putting this behind us.’
No jars of jam then, no lavender soap, not a word spoken or confided, until she’d felt she might go mad with the denial of it. They put it behind them, alright. They harnessed themselves to it, and dragged it like a black deadweight at their backs. They became its beasts of burden. And not a neighbour in sight, then, to drop by with a crumb of pity or a listening ear. Frank had decided that nobody was to know.
‘I’m not going to be a burden on anyone, is that clear?’ he mutters to her when the physios finally leave them alone for the afternoon. And knocks her hand away, as she goes to wipe some gravy off his chin.
That’s Frank all over. Can’t hold a fork, but can still find a way to smack her out of the way.
‘Bob Wilkes did it,’ she calls, but he doesn’t turn or respond. She imagines him giving up and toppling, curled there on the ground. She’s never seen him curled up, not even when she sat there with him in the dirt, waiting for the ambulance. He’d stayed in control then too, sprawled there licking his lips every now and again, his eyes losing focus with something like bewilderment as he stared up into the blue, something almost innocent.
She’s never seen this, and it’s mortifying. They’d warned her about acute pain; she wonders about getting up and giving him some tablets, but she’s so shocked all she can do is turn her head back to look up at the ceiling and spare him the shame of her scrutiny. They lie rigidly side by side.
‘When you stood up to run home and call the ambulance,’ he says, ‘I thought, well, now I've got ten minutes. Now would be the good time to die, while you weren’t there. That's what I could give you.’
Lying there, she has a sense of how it is, suddenly: willing your limbs to move but being unable to lift them. The terrible treasonous distance between them that must be traversed, the numbed heaviness of her arm.
She lies there feeling the pulse in her husband’s pitifully thin wrist under her little finger. She understands better than anyone, she thinks, the painful stretch of sinew, the crack of dislocation. Remembers herself running back over the paddocks, flying barefoot over stones and earth, looking down distractedly in the ambulance later to notice the dried blood on her feet. How fast she’d run, and how much faster she’d run back. Now, in the dark bed, she raises her arm with Frank’s and gently flexes both their elbows together. She places his hand wordlessly, determinedly, over his heart, and holds it there.
