The Thing About July…
For the last 12 years, it arrives sometimes as a dark cloud and sometimes as hurricane. Sometimes it sneaks up on me and catches me off guard. Sometimes it is a loud train barreling down the tracks. A shift in mood. Quick to temper. More hypervigilance. Always culminating with a sadness that seeks to take me under.
Trauma seems inexplicably linked to the calendar. We can instantly remember a smell, a word, an image, a person or some small detail from a date. We travel back to the place that seems frozen in our mind. It is not usually a trip that we book a ticket for with careful planning and all the right items in our suitcase. It’s suddenly being somewhere else and not knowing how you got there. We look around, remember, reexperience the grief and at some point, float back to our current time with the sensations still in our body. The remembering.
Maybe the remembering has a purpose. Not to drag us under, but as a signal flag that we have work to do. It tells us where we are still carrying our pain. Where we are still deeply afraid. It whispers, “You can do this. You will feel lighter when you no longer carry the weight.” But maybe we can’t hear it because we are awash in pain or fear. What if we could greet it as a friend? What if we could see it for what it really was? A chance to let go and to see how far we have come?
12 years ago, I spent two of the longest weeks of my life at DC Children’s Hospital with my then 6-week-old son. Failure to thrive it said in black and white. All I could see was the word failure. My malnourished baby. It was my job to feed him and to keep him safe. And I failed. At least that is what the darkest parts of my soul understood.
Two weeks of an endless parade of people in and out of the room, tests, questions and no answers. And finally, the answer that would change everything. Cystic Fibrosis. A diagnosis that should have been discovered in utero by my OB but a reckless error on her part kept that information a mystery for 6 long weeks. She failed me. I failed my child. I had passed on the defective gene. My child might not live to be an adult. My son will likely never be able to have biological children. It all came crashing down.
It turned me into Mama Bear. I would NOT fail my child again. 12 years of medical binders, relentless adherence to medication and treatments. Doctors, specialists, hospitalizations. The job has become embedded in my DNA. No time for wallowing. I must keep this ship moving in the right direction at all costs.
But the thing about July…it comes around every year. And if I wasn’t going to face my trauma voluntarily, it was going to show up and remind me of its presence. For several years that meant reliving it and just finding a way to get through. Until the anger began to consume me, and I knew that I needed help. Enter stage left, the therapist who I trust with my life. The one who patiently held space while waiting for me to finally let the walls down. The one who helped me find my own sense of safety so that I could be brave enough to look inward. To feel compassion for myself. To forgive myself. It has been the hardest work of my life. There are moments when I think of my OB, or I think of the 2 residents who probably still regret their decision to stick my child with a needle when I left the room. I can instantly feel the anger rising. But you know what? Now I see it for what it is. I make space for it. I know that it is my grief and my fear. I know that it is my worry that I might have failed my child. I can now hold space for that 37-year-old first-time Mom who was doing the best she could.
Every year it gets lighter. But not with just the passing of time—it is with the willingness to look at the shadows in order to get to the light. To choose the courage to go into the fire again and again in order to extinguish the flames. To let others help you on the journey. To know that you don’t have to fight the fire alone. You can find your people and have them bring their tools. And you know what? If you still have to hold your breath a little bit until July is over, that’s okay too.
The thing about July…it always rolls around and gives me another chance to remember and release.
