Remembering is Never Just Remembering

Healing doesn’t just close certain chapters. Sometimes it opens doors.

Content Note: Mentions of emotional abuse, sexual coercion, memory recovery, and the return of maternal longing. Read gently.

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There’s something both terrifying and liberating about realizing that your brain locked certain things away so you didn’t have to deal with them.

Liberating because it’s awe worthy that our brains can almost overrule our consciousness and awareness. It’s only goal being to keep us safe and functioning day to day. Terrifying because, once that vault gets unlocked, everything hits you slowly, in waves.

One morning you wake up and you feel like you have your footing again, but then a certain song plays or someone makes some random comment, and another wave hits you. Its strength catches you off guard, knocking you over, and making you rethink moments you didn’t realize you never wanted to think about again.

A little more than six years ago, I broke up with my now ex boyfriend. He wasn’t a great guy. Whenever someone would ask me about him in the months and years following, I’d tell them he was mentally and emotionally abusive, which he was. He was very good at making me feel like the smallest person on earth, and I would often tell myself that I should be thankful that he even wanted me.

I was 22 when I entered the relationship. He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my first truly bad decision. He was my age, just younger than me by two months, but more experienced than I was, way more experienced, and he often held that over me, often telling me that I’d never find another man to love me while being as inexperienced as I was. I felt grateful.

It wasn’t until two and half months ago when the vault that held the more traumatizing memories in my mind finally opened, and I was overwhelmed with the fact that the abuse I’d endured during that relationship wasn’t just mental and emotional, but sexual as well. As the memories flooded back, one after another, I grappled with the same thing that I remembered grappling with at the time everything happened: “it wasn’t violent, he didn’t hit me, I didn’t scream, it wasn’t that bad, it doesn’t count.” But it did. Sexual coercion always counts.

A month or so ago, I was talking with my mom, the topic of the conversation is lost to me now, but it was in the middle of that conversation where one of the many memories I’ve recovered over the last few months about my abusive ex-boyfriend came roaring back.

One night, maybe eight months or so before I’d break up with him, we had a conversation that landed freshly on top of the reasons I had to leave him.

“I’m never bringing children into this world,” he said to me, chain smoking two feet away from me in my backyard, “it’s terrible.”

I froze, confused, with a lump in my throat that I didn’t expect. This was the man that had spent the last four years going on and on about how all he wanted in life was to be a father. That was his goal in life, his ultimate dream. The one thing he wanted more than anything.

“But what about all the times you told me you just wanted to be a dad?” I said.

He took another drag of his cigarette, “I just said all that in case you ever got pregnant on accident. Get you used to the idea so you wouldn’t hate them.”

In the 30 seconds after those words left his mouth, it felt like someone had placed a baby in my arms and then stolen it right back.

I was never a maternal person. By the time this conversation happened, I was 26, and I’d spent so much of the last four years managing him and his moods and his mental state, while my own deteriorated before my eyes, that I never had the time or the energy to even remotely begin truly considering a child. But he did. Reminded me of it constantly. He made it seem like he’d be an amazing father. I don’t think I believed it, but he said it with so much conviction that the idea had planted itself in my brain. If we had a future together, this is what it would entail. To this day, I’m thankful I never slept with him. I managed to hold that line at least.

As I sat, staring at him, feeling too many emotions at once, I couldn’t even come up with a decent response. The way he had flipped the script on me so casually, blatantly admitting that he’d lied to me for the last four years, stealing in 10 seconds the imaginary future I’d tried to build in my mind? In that moment, he had made every single maternal button in my soul light up for the first time ever.

How dare he make that choice for me? How dare he spend four years making it sound like being a father was the one thing that could make him happier in life? How dare he trap me in this cycle of abuse and love bombing, warming me up to the idea of being a mother one day, to only say that it was a lie, just in case he was ever able to get me to sleep with him and an accident happened?

I guess my face must have betrayed the emotions running through me because he then followed up with, “but I’d never deny you kids, honey, if you really wanted them.”

I cried that night once I was alone, in my bedroom. I’d never lost a child, but part of me almost felt like it. Another part of me knew that if I stayed in that relationship much longer, I’d probably end up losing a lot more.

The remembering of this moment felt like a gut punch. The way the fragments of the conversation moved in my brain. It was sudden and harsh, coming from the vault my trauma had built, back into my awareness. It was like watching a puzzle build itself, somehow moving both slow like molasses in the arctic, but then quicker than I could realize, like the wings of a hummingbird.

Now, seven years later, I sit here with the deepest ache in my soul to have a baby. Not for anyone else, but for myself. It is a new ache, a fresh one. One that only showed itself to me once I finally began to remember and process all the awful things my ex did and said to me, and I finally felt safe and whole again.

I had a moment, back at the end of July, that resonated so deeply within me, where I finally knew what true safety could feel like when coming from a man. It wasn’t anything intense or wild, just a hug. A hug from a man that had radiated safety to me for so long, that when this hug happened, it relaxed my nervous system in a way I didn’t know I was ready for.

It’s been three months since that hug, and I finally feel like an entire person again. Sometimes my brain will choose to play back certain memories that I’ve finally processed recently, but instead of filling me with emotions and panic and dissociating? I can look at them, understand that they happened to me, but they’re not happening now and that they don’t define me. I do.

The desire to be a mother coming out of nowhere is still strange to me. Maybe it’s the cliched biological clock everyone talks about, or maybe it’s just the fact that I feel like an entire person again, after being partially frozen for the last 10 years, from the time the abuse started up until the vault cracked open. And when I think about being a mother? It doesn’t feel like being one of those ones who have a child because they will have to love them unconditionally, no. I don’t want a child to fix me or to fill a void. I want a child because it seems selfish, in a way, to feel all this love I have inside of me, and to not have a home for it to live.

When I was in the middle of fully processing a couple of months ago, I had a moment where I was almost angry at myself, at my brain, for holding back all the memories. But once the waves died down and I felt like myself again, I realized that all my brain was doing was trying to protect me. It held back all the awful things until my entire self felt safe and secure enough to be able to look at them and not completely collapse under the weight of it all. Our brains are truly powerful things.

Healing is not a linear process, and even though I feel fairly good about where I am right now, as early on in my healing as I am, I know I still have a ways to go. I still break down sometimes, when I think about all the time I wasted, but then I look at myself now. Stronger, a bit more confident, and growing, mentally and emotionally.

I have a box in my room filled with things I’m buying for my future baby. I have no idea how far away they are, timeline wise, or how they’re gonna get there, or if they’ll even be mine biologically, but it doesn’t matter. It’s almost as if I can feel them, this small, tiny little soul out there somewhere, watching and waiting for me, for their Mama, to be ready.

I feel like I’m getting closer.

xo grace