Twenty months

In May of 2016, I went to bed as me and woke up in someone else’s life. I may have come a long way since then, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t have some residual issues hanging on like parasites.

Most of the time, I have trouble understanding how it’s taken so long for me to recover. It’s only when I force myself to catalog everything I’ve survived and accomplished since that very first morning in hell that I comprehend the full scope of my achievement.

So, bear with me a moment; today I’m going to try to put this into perspective for myself, and maybe for the rest of you too. Let’s pretend that, twenty months ago, I had a baby.

Like any other baby, my baby was born screaming at the abrupt, raw, piercing brutality of her birth, helpless and ill-prepared to care for herself in her strange new world. At first, my baby did nothing more than cry, eat, and sleep. She was only able to focus from my breast to my face, which helped curtail sensory overload.

We’ve all been there, right? Information can be overwhelming and sometimes just surviving the day can take every bit of energy you can muster.

That is exactly how I felt when I found out that my husband had molested my child. I was raw and brutalized by my new, mind-bending reality. In those first days, I had an overwhelming number of things demanding my immediate attention, but everything was too bright, too loud, too scary. For the most part, I was on autopilot. However, there were things that couldn’t wait for the sensory overload to abate. So, I poured every bit of focus into our physical safety and laying the initial groundwork for my son’s path to recovery.

Soon, my baby learned to sit up and roll over. She taught herself how to crawl. She didn’t care how bruised and battered her knees were, or even where she was going, she was moving.

About five weeks after the crime, the school year ended. I laid out a rough plan for the final piece of our move, a three-week cross-country adventure. I put considerably less effort into the planning process than is normal for me. Honestly, I didn’t really care where we were going; we just needed to go. I needed to keep us from sitting still so we wouldn’t feel the breath-stealing sting of the wounds that were still gaping wide.

This need to stay busy continued for months. In fact, it was only when I had successfully gotten us all the way across the country and tucked into our new home that I began to feel the full impact of the trauma. That was when I began to fall apart.

As my baby neared twelve months of life, she pulled herself up on anything within reach. Then, she took a few steps, and then a few more, and then a few more after that. My baby learned to walk. But within months, she was no longer walking anywhere. My baby was running. Every time something got in her way and knocked her down, my baby got back up and kept going.

Six months after the crime, I took my first steps in New York City with my friend, Lisa. It was on that trip that I discovered it was actually possible to go a few hours at a time without thinking about everything that had happened. That trip gave me the hope I needed to push forward and fight for it.

Did I fall down again? Most definitely. My to-do list still seemed infinite. Among a million tiny things clamoring for my attention, I needed to find a full-time job and finalize my divorce. And, as we crept ever closer to the trial, I knew we were going to have to spend an unknown number of days in the same room as the person haunting us day and night. But, I could finally see that recovery was a possible, if distant, blip on the horizon.

By twenty months, my baby was fully mobile, an unstoppable force, constantly in motion and soaking up every word, every experience within her grasp. She didn’t look the same, she didn’t feel the same, she didn’t act the same as she had the very first time I held her in my arms. But it didn’t matter; as I watched her develop into her twenty-month-old self, I discovered that I loved her even more.

I would never expect my baby to rush through the different stages of development, so why is it that I have expected myself to rush through the different stages of trauma recovery?

The crime committed against my child and the unrelenting chaos that continued for over a year stripped me down to my core. Things I’d previously known to be true completely disintegrated. I had to learn or unlearn a continuously shifting and heaving mountain of things, yet there was no time to stop fighting, not even for one moment. I couldn’t stop planning for every possibility, I couldn’t stop doing every minuscule thing I could imagine that might help my child succeed in his recovery. Every second has been exhausting.

Until now.

My son is doing well. Really well. Last October, I began Prolonged Exposure therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For the past couple of months, my load has been getting increasingly lighter. I’ve been able to jump back onto my feet and stride forward time and time and time again. And now, as I near the end of my treatment, the ground under my feet is solid and stable, like it’s supposed to be.

Gone is the fear, the anger, the overwhelming sadness.

For the first time in twenty months, I am free.

My steps are no longer tentative; I am no longer walking. Today, I am running, not to escape a predator whose breath is hot on the back of my neck, but because I want to feel the wind rushing through my hair. I’m running because I am ready to embrace life again. I’m running because I don’t want to waste another minute.

It feels good to be me again. And that, my friends, is an accomplishment to savor.

All of today’s photos come from a 2017 summer trip to Island Park, Idaho. You should go; it’s gorgeous and close to Yellowstone National Park.