The weather is so gorgeous right now. It’s raining, but it’s also sixty-five degrees out. A summer rain. Just deepened from gloaming into night. So lovely. My potato plants are going to yield produce early. I can walk on a soft lawn through summer. Barefoot.
Today: a lot of work, all of it good. But I’m tired, and afflicted with nausea. In waves, it comes and goes.
& poor sleep the night before.
Distraction. An argument with my son, after he breaks something precious of ours. He leaves the house for a date with friends, hot on the heels of exchanged cross words. I clean the bathroom sink and as I hear the car pull out the gravel driveway I put him in my prayers (again). I love him; he is such a struggle for me at times.
My children are especially bright, especially clever. They notice that I have a hard time forming a completed thought. That housework and errands and groceries and cooking and cleaning (and writing and sewing) distracts me. I can work in my own world; the kids are by turns patient or angry. I apologize for my scattered-ness; maybe this is one reason I hold them so often, so many times during the day. I’m here, dear one. I want to stay.
At five o’clock Nels tells me he wants to go to Vacation Bible School – the last night – after all. I’m standing in the kitchen doorway with a clean kitchen towel and feeling despair. My car isn’t running, I can’t ask anyone to take the child; I have a large meal to get to another family way across Aberdeen. But I told my son to make up his mind and he’s made it up. The lasagna in the oven and a sink full of dishes and I drive him across town.
On the way home and police lights on the side of the road. I’m grateful we are all safe. I have been trying to drive more carefully, noticing others seem more careless during the summer weather.
We are safe. Right? I don’t feel safe. I have been re-living a trauma over and over again, and this has been sapping my strength the better part of a year. I pray, I meditate, I work, I rest, I help others, I am kind to myself. And yet I still haven’t gotten over it. I hear all the correct words in my head – the people who know more than me. They say, “Remember, this happened to your child – it didn’t happen to you. Don’t make it about you.” I know there are people who have the key, who are more correct than I.
And yet I feel a kind of terror I’ve never felt.
I think I sourced it, about three weeks ago in a gathering of relatives and friends of alcoholics. I think I know why I don’t feel safe.
Believe it or not, knowing why I feel so unsafe actually helps. It isn’t something I can share while certain parties are alive. But it is something I can know and share with trusted friends.
Unsafety. I can live in Unsafety. I can do this thing.
I am very prone to PTSD, and I get it from things that happen to other people, as well as things that happen to me. When I was a child, I suffered from it as a result of a house fire in our neighborhood that killed two young children. For several years, if I heard a fire siren when I was playing in the neighborhood, I would take off for home, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood why. It was a knee-jerk reaction. My point is that you CAN be traumatized by someone else’s trauma, especially when it’s your child. Maybe experts wouldn’t agree with me, but my experience tells me that it can happen.
@Barb
The experts, or at least some of them, do agree with you. Thank you for commenting. I appreciate it.