I Once Was
“Sweet girl. Look at me. You are okay. You are safe. I promise I will come back for you. I don’t know what to do to save you now, but I’ll come back tomorrow to check on you. But for today, know that you are safe and you are loved. I know you feel so scared right now, but I want you to know that you grow up to become a beautiful woman and you will be loved by many. You will have two daughters of your own and a husband and a home. And in this life you create, you are safe and you are loved. So, please keep holding on. Don’t let go just yet. You are so strong. I promise I will be back, and I promise you, you are okay.”
January 22nd, 2016, 33 years old, I stood in an office of a stranger, speaking these words of love and hope to the terrified child inside me; to the little girl, who at 7 years old, had lost her mother, first to schizophrenia, and then to a terminal battle with bone cancer. A little girl who had to stand aside and watch as her mom lay bed-ridden, down to nothing but skin and bone, in unbearable pain. A helpless little girl, a scared little girl, a broken-hearted little girl.
And that little girl stayed tucked inside of me…for decades…
She was with me at my mother’s funeral;
During the stormy years of my dad’s second marriage – every fight, every separation, every time we moved out, to a different home, a different school, and then back again;
The two nights my step-brother snuck into my room, pinched me to make sure I was asleep, and then sexually abused me – those very nights I trapped myself in my body and feigned sleep, and the terror-filled days following;
Every time my first step-mother showed up to my school to pull me out of class to spit her venom at me;
When they got divorced; when my dad remarried;
When I moved away from home and got married myself;
When I delivered my daughter Abby via emergency c-section, and the first week of her life that was spent in the NICU;
The first time my body mis-carried at 12 weeks, and the months of depression that followed;
The second time I mis-carried, in a porta potty on my daughter’s school field trip;
When I had my second daughter, Lucy;
When we were hit by a semi-truck, and my 3-month-old was in the PICU for two days because of bleeding in her brain;
When my world came crashing down after I took a stance of full inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community alongside my church.
All that to say, that little girl had seen a lot, and for a long time she stayed little. For a long time, it worked well for her to stay small and quiet, to try her hardest to be good and stay in the background, not adding to the chaos around her. For a long time, there was safety in her smallness. For a long time she survived in her smallness. But when my daughter, Abby, turned 7, my whole world got flipped on its head. I would watch Abby or hold her, and all I could think was, “Is this what I looked like to people? Was I really this little, this beautiful, this charming when I lost everything?” Then I was overcome with this paralyzing fear: “How am I supposed to be her mom? I don’t know how to be a mom to a 7-year-old. Oh god, I don’t want to screw her up. Look how screwed up I am. I’m so broken…I don’t want to break her.” My mind was swirling, and confused, and dark. So I pulled away from Abby. I stopped hugging her. I stopped holding her. I pulled away from everyone. I pulled away from life. I started retreating and disappearing (which was something I had gotten really good at).
“There comes a time in your life when the love you thought would never leave you does…And at last you have the opportunity to come face to face with your own loving.”
-Meggan Watterson, “Reveal”
Then, January 2015, at 32 years old, I took one of my first big steps towards integrating my outer persona with my inner person – although, at the time I would have never known to call it that. I took a public stance, alongside my church community, for FULL inclusion of ALL people in our church; regardless of faith, gender, sexuality…all of it. And that year, friendships shifted, conversations intensified, and lifelong relationships altered. Life changed, because I was changing. In the beginning of this metamorphosis from the “quiet, obedient, respectful, perfect, little girl”, I was not equipped to handle the criticism. I came to the realization that up to this point in life, everything I said, did, or didn’t do was for someone else, because of someone else, or to please someone else. Every decision I had made up to this point required validation and approval by others, and once that validation dissipated I was left alone in my own fog. I was forced inward, forced to face my own knowing and my own loving, and what I found was bleak. The realization of my inability to care for myself, express emotions, and validate my own experiences was suffocating.
This was the point where I had to acknowledge that the tools that had helped me survive to this point in life, would not be sufficient to carry me through to the next. My coping mechanism of suppressing my thoughts and emotions from others in order to protect them, fueled an inward decay that was invisible and deafening at the same time. I was beginning to see that these tools were only serving to shrink me, hurt others, and build walls around myself. The emissary I had unknowingly created to speak on my behalf, to shield the terrified girl from the big scary world (and the scary people in that world), that person that everyone saw on the outside – SHE was not working anymore…and the world she created was slowly but surely crumbling.
So this, ALL of this, packaged in a pretty nutshell, is what led me to that day, in a stranger’s office, heaving tears of mourning, longing, compassion and love, for that little girl inside of me. Because, that little girl was me. I was that 7-year-old in my 33-year-old body. I was maneuvering an adult woman’s life with the inner-workings of a child. This is what led me to months of ripping and restitching, unlearning and rebuilding, falling and rising, death and resurrection. It would lead to the growing up of that little girl, and would eventually lead me to who I am today:
a PEACE WARRIOR (in training). More on that later.