The next few days are a blur and I lean fully on the support from friends and family as I navigate a PTSD response I had no idea I would experience. Nightmares, leg spasms and a constant nausea are just a few of the symptoms that bombard me. The fifth day, after my television interview, I finally have a breakdown and my Husband takes the kids with him to go stay with his Dad. My dear friend Marti comes to stay with me and forces me to leave the house for the first time in almost a week. We drive to a local lake and she takes me to the dam where we stand and she tells me to breathe and let go. I watch the water pumping fiercely through the dam and I feel a release deep in my core. A strong feeling of warmth overwhelms me, and a small voice reminds me, I must press on.
I sleep better that night but still wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. I feel like I’m suffocating and have to rush out the door of my bedroom onto my patio to stand in a flowerbed. I used to do this with my children when they were barely toddlers and having a tantrum or when they felt overwhelmed. I ground myself then I reach out to people, regardless of the fact it’s three in the morning. I DM my therapist friend on Twitter and message my friend’s mom who is also a therapist. I text my massage therapist, David and ask him for prayers. To my relief all of them respond with advice and love and support. I call my sister in Brooklyn and beg her to come home, Sarah promises me she will, even though we both know she can’t fly to Oklahoma in the middle of a damn Pandemic. In the next few days the nightmares of the attack begin to dissipate though, I can still project myself to the moment of the attack with lightning speed. I still see the trees beyond the fence when I close my eyes at night.
When I decided to come forward about the sexual assault I never anticipated the trauma I would relive. I held onto the attack for almost twenty years, never even telling my best friends or husband about it. Consequently, I spend the next few months remembering years of experiences I had buried deep down inside. I find myself listening to music I haven’t enjoyed since I exited my teen years. I become moody, anxious and combative and I find it very hard to focus on the present, quite like the surly teenager I became in the years that followed that night in Hafer Park.
My mind is constantly traveling through time to 2001 and I start to close off from my husband. Dressing and undressing in front of him becomes embarrassing and I feel like it’s inappropriate to engage any sort of physical intimacy with him. Almost, as if I am fifteen again, I am thrown back into the purity culture I was raised in and am unsure of how to break free and reclaim my sexual nature, like I so successfully did in my twenties. I don’t feel like the liberated woman I once was and retreat into a prudeness that is both off-putting and understandably, baffling to my husband.
As we work through my issues a new rage builds up inside me as I am witness to Grant saving face on social media and committing himself to a rehab center for nine weeks. I wish I had a rehab center to recover in as I continue daily tasks and tend to my family’s needs that never dissipate. How I process trauma in front of my children is constantly on the forefront of my mind and I often feel it’s unfair that an airplane won’t be arriving to whisk me away to a desert rehab facility with 24 hour support. Instead of a relaxing oasis I’m left stranded on an island between my adolescence and the responsibilities of motherhood.
The question that overwhelms me the most is, how do I care for my family when I feel like a child myself? How do I move past this while providing the normalcy and stability my children crave and deserve? I press on anyway. The answer won’t come in a timely manner but I press on anyway. For that’s what one does when there is no clear path forward. We press on anyway till we find our way through the trees.
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