Will I always be living with trauma?

(trauma)

First of all, Happy Birthday to my DD2!  She had a birthday this past week and when I put together pictures from when she was a baby until now, firmly settled into elementary school, I honestly can’t believe how fast time has flown.  I am so grateful that she is a bouncing, lively, loving, kind, hilarious, energetic kid full of love and laughter for the world.  (And also, how long I was doing the single mom thing and divorced parent and re-married world since she was one.  It’s mind boggling!!)

Despite learning that my ex is seemingly in a happier place with his new girlfriend—it is long distance, which I’m sure has its challenges—he has been quite “extra” lately.  Nitpicking every other email, demanding certain time sharing requirements, then when I ask for the same type of time sharing, responding that it’s a huge accommodation and he’ll have to think about it.  He spends a lot of time documenting all of my shortcomings.  And stressing out the girls about having to wait an hour for DD2’s birthday pizza and then refusing to take it and going to a different pizza place (meanwhile poor DD2 is hungry, it’s 8pm when they call me about it all), or telling the girls that they live in a ‘shack’ and so the girls come home telling me they live in a shack and DD2 is especially concerned about daddy not having enough money.  (You know, because they just flew first class to take a vacation over the break.)

In the midst of this, DD2 was sick and had to miss school.  I always wish that if DD2 is sick, it will be on mom time, so as to be less stress, no back and forth, she can just rest in peace.  However because a dad day fell within her sickness time, she had to embark on the back and forth, the texts/emails that come in demanding to know every single detail of temperature and the level down to the decimal.  (Of course when I inquired of her temperature he never responded.  /eyeroll).

Dealing with this crap is just the pits.  I was explaining it to someone who works in the field of child victims and witnesses of violent crime:  it just never ends.  I haven’t ‘escaped’ an abusive marriage.  I am joined to the hip with this person and constantly negotiating and unpacking the emotional baggage that he foists on them his implied version of all the things that I do wrong and my shortcomings (he’s crafty and doesn’t come out and say mom is awful, just mom should do this or that) and his worries about money and his emotional needs, and still being neutral and supporting them in their relationship with their dad, helping them know their feelings are their feelings and not their dad’s…it’s constant triggering, constant, constant, constant.

Will I always be living with trauma? 

Completely separate from these musings, I was reading a random, Y/A Garth Nix novel, and in it, one of the characters lost a ton of blood.  The character is unable to stand or walk.  And I suddenly remembered the night after DD2 was born, I tried to get up and remember walking slowly to the bathroom in our hospital room.  I was lightheaded—and then I remember feeling so relaxed and going toward this soft, white light and I couldn’t wait to open the door, I knew there were people waiting for me.  But something told me to turn around, and so I told the light, hang on, I’ll be right back.

The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital bed blinking into the faces of seven or eight people—the on call resident, nurses, and who knows who else.  I’d fainted due to hemorrhaging and blood loss, and while they caught it in time and had it temporarily under control, the next morning they had to excavate my womb for bits of placenta and after birth so I would stop bleeding (which was excruciatingly painful--they couldn’t give any pain meds and basically the nurse stuck her arm up my wahoo and dug out with her gloved hands the remains!  Sounds fun, right!  I would scream because it was the only way to live through the pain).  Anyway, they were mulling over whether or not I should get a blood transfusion, as whatever that number you’re supposed to be at, I was right on the in between.  (this is why birth is no joke, even though we make plenty of jokes about it, and why modern medicine, for all its bad rep for costs, etc, saves lives all the damn time, because if this had happened in the good old little house on the prairies days, you know this mama would have croaked).

Two days later, I was released to go home, along with a warning on how fatigued I would be due to the blood loss, and it would take 4-6 weeks to get my red blood count back up and energy level would be low until then.

And I remembered, with clarity, how awful and jerky the ex husband was to me after we got home.  The big dramatic sighs it was to ‘take care’ of me, by going up and down the stairs to bring me water or food.  Or when we ventured out into the world to pick up my medicine from the pharmacy (including lots of iron!), he parked at the parking spot far away from the door in order to protect the car from potential scratches (because, you know, someone might park like a jerk and hit our car with their car door), making the walk inside that much farther and more difficult for me.  The dramatic sighing if I said I was tired.  All while I was taking care of a newborn who was waking up every 2-3 hours to nurse, and also big sister who was 3.  Losing his temper and yelling at DD1 or stomping around for whatever he decided he was pissed off about (usually my mom, who was staying with us for a few weeks after DD2 was born).  My mom tried to talk to me about his awful behavior, but I wouldn’t hear it at the time.  I was too busy trying to keep the family “together” and relegated my mom’s observations as just over-worried and not understanding the pressure the ex was under in becoming a father times 2 (remembering “the dark time” of when DD1 was born). 

I realize this is a long drawn out description of something from years and years ago, but this is why I wonder if I will always live with trauma.  I was reading a completely random book, and got triggered into this crazy memory.  Honestly, describing it in writing is longer than it took for all of these thoughts to flit through my brain…

I’m going to therapy later today, because healing is a marathon.  Maybe I will always live with trauma, but hopefully I don’t have to be ruled by it.  Today is a good day—I’m not paralyzed with frustration like I was last week.  I don’t have to wear this familiar pain like a blanket.  It’s time to cast it off, damn it.  I can’t help that it keeps coming around, because I have to keep dealing with him on a regular basis.

When I’m enveloped by the triggers, especially the EXTRA emails/texts from him, at times I can be flooded with stress, uncertainty, fear.  Yet, I’ve always navigated through the difficulties in the past. I have to remember that I’ll navigate through them again.  That those momentary paralyzing moments will pass.  It’s hard to remember when you’re in them, though.

So I’ll go back to that mantra—I may live with trauma, but I don’t have to be ruled by it.  Here’s to hope and healing and living a better life.