My hunny is upstairs in bed, sleeping after CQ duty. I do so love to have the husband in house.
I love his wide, solid chest and his jutting chin and his going to the mailbox each time he gets home and the way he wanders down the driveway, sorting through it as he gets to the door, the red dirt all over his boots and ACUs.
I feel like I've lived so many different lives. I wonder if this is what's like to get older. Mostly I don't remember, but then I'll get this vivid sliver of a way I used to live, a view from a window that's strange to me now or the smell of the coffee I used to always drink on my days off, back when I was a manager and rented a small apartment in western Denver with a room mate. Did I do that? Was that me?
I did do that. And I used to take a much younger Lynn for walks around the suburban paradise that is Highland's Ranch, CO and wonder at the sea of roof tops stretching out for miles around me in the hot sun of a late afternoon, and the glass towers of the Tech Center in the distance. All those people all living so close together and yet it was so quiet I could hear the wind in the grass of the park.
I had a huge breakthrough internally last week. It was no accident that I had a recurrence of post memory symptoms right around the time I've been actively trying to get pregnant, no accident at all. In fact, I think my anxiety actually caused the irregularity of my periods. It threatened the last internal stronghold that my abuser held over me.
Abuse is about power as much as it is about gratification of desires. It is about the power to crush and dominate. I thought I had walked out from under that, and I had. But there was one piece remaining, buried so deeply it felt like memories waking up. But it wasn't memories, it was a self conception, a piece of myself that had felt the imprint of the abuser so heavily and without recourse that the rest of myself had quarantined it as though it were a repressed memory.
All my life I've quarantined it. Only in the last few years did it come up from time to time and each time I savagely thrust it back down into the dark. But the active pursuit of pregnancy made it impossible to go away and so it set off this horrible internal chaos. I had to face it.
I can't over express the kind of courage it takes to face down the internal dark. The body and spirit repress memories because they know that keeping those memories out will cause horrible, crippling damage. Therefore, releasing them or even going anywhere near them can feel life threatening.
But experience taught me that once released into the light, the thing loses its power. That's what EMDR does. It takes the person back to the moment and they relive it, but without completely losing the present. They learn to reframe that moment in the light of who they are now.
And that's what I had to do with this piece of myself. I had to release it from the oppressive dark. In doing so, I released a flood of shame, horror and guilt; all those feelings that are intimately associated with being sexual used. But again I have had experience with that, and was able to allow those emotions to pass right through, to not hold on to them and above all, to not fall into the trap of giving them any powers of self definition.
This is hard to do, it takes a lot of practise and outside encouragement at first. It's what I meant when I said that my mom and I had commanded the pain. I had to have this internal conversation over and over again, as the emotions welled up and then dissolved again.
And through it all I experienced the most incredible healing. A great rush of warm, strong maternal feeling welled up in me, so sweetly and naturally and until then, unknown to me. I opened my arms to it; I felt an almost physical pain at my own longing to give birth to a child, to nurse them, to cuddle and nurture and love that child. For the first time, I experienced confidence in my own mothering instincts. I would not be stiff and withdrawn or full of shame.
This is an organic process, so the healing grows each day but that moment was a major turning point for me. It is a triumph of the power of life; over evil, over damage. It makes me think of this verse:
"The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.
I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly."
-John 10:10
