In The Telling of Our Stories, We Can Save Ourselves
How do we achieve healing from the past? That’s a question I’ve asked myself often, because shouldn’t we focus on the here and now — the philosophers seem to think so. They tell us it’s our ticket to happiness.
Healing From The Past: My Story
I didn’t start out writing about her, my mother. But these stories write themselves. Some would say rehashing the past isn’t healthy. Life is forward-moving, so shouldn’t I keep the pace? But I have a deeper longing, and it draws me to the page. I give voice to the past because it mattered. And while the years can dull the colors of memory, trauma does not yield to time. In the telling of our stories, we can save ourselves. We can heal from the past.
A journalist, I take my lunch breaks during the workweek and dial my mother’s number on my cell phone. We chat freely, like friends who don’t have secrets. Indelible secrets.
“I interviewed a man with a tiny dog that wears sunglasses and sneakers,” I say.
“The dog wears sneakers?” she asks.
“Yup.”
We laugh. I stab my salad with a fork as she tells me to text her a picture. Mom and I talk about fashion, food, work and the terrible shows we watch on television. But we don’t talk about feelings, about heartbreak or abuse. We don’t talk about the things she allowed in our household, the things she defended. The man she seems to love more than her children, more than anyone can fathom.
There were times when I tried to address this. When my old wounds ached for the salve of acknowledgment, understanding. I painstakingly wrote my mother letters and rehearsed conversations in front of the mirror. But on one occasion after I told her how I truly felt, she slammed doors, screamed obscenities and threatened to take her own life. If I’m so terrible, maybe you’d prefer it if I were dead. Hysterics were a winning tactic.
“Leave her alone,” a family member said. “It’s too much stress for your mother. Move on.”
But healing the past was my precursor to moving on. A first step towards my healing destination.
After that loved one admonished me for revisiting the past, I began to think perhaps I was not so much seeking closure as I was clinging to issues that were better left alone. Was I merely seeking attention, behaving like a child in the throws of a tantrum?
Sometimes I catch up with my sister, who lives many states away and struggles with her mental health. She tells me she loves me and that her life is hard. Her memories are sharper than mine, each one like the edge of a blade that thrusts itself into her heart. For years, she’s tried and failed at healing from the past.
Our discussions about our childhood are the threads that connect us across time and distance. She is my witness and lifetime advocate, my sister who made microwave nachos with me and wore my favorite skirts to school. When I hear her voice on the line, I remember her as the girl in our little white house in Milwaukee, my big sister who babysat the neighborhood kids and bought packs of sunflower seeds from the Stop-N-Go. The girl who couldn’t escape the monster who came into our shared bedroom at night, the monster who touched in the dark. Perhaps she remembers me as the clumsy girl who spilled her milk at the dinner table and was lifted from the chair, thrust against the wall and swatted like a squirming bug by the monster who touched in all the bad ways.
“My lungs hurt,” I told my sister that night as we lay in our beds.
“I want to kill him,” she groaned.
But these nightmares are lost to my mother, so how can healing from the past be possible? The discrepancies that exist in our memories are maddening and confusing. They create chasms between Mom and me. I’ve learned there’s a name for this: The Mother Wound. When I hear stories of women like me with pain like mine, it makes the world seem a little bit smaller. Our trauma becomes a kinship.
Some people will warn us not to wallow. They say life is good. We should celebrate the future and not get stuck in the past. Why tell a gut-wrenching story when we can share happier tales? But I know there is a time and a place for our narratives. The chorus of voices cry out on the page, and whether sad or uplifting, these voices create the music that moves our feet–our hearts. They tell stories that resonate with us, stories that teach us how to heal from the past.
Our history matters. It may not reveal who we are, but it is how we came to be. I may never hear from my mother the things a daughter longs to hear. But I won’t stop telling my stories. The words live in my body, swim in my soul like schools of tiny fish. My stories affirm I survived. They tell me I can heal from the past. You can too.
P.S. If you’re interested in landing a publishing deal, read about how I did it.
