Birth Day: trauma and gratitude

TODAY it is my darlingest daughter’s 7th birthday. I don’t think I could ever love someone more than I love her.

Most years I find myself staying on high alert throughout the night before her birthday in a kind of post-traumatic vigil, a retrospective anticipation of her birth. The body holds trauma in such a way that it can’t tell past from present, and an anniversary or a reminder can whisk one back to the event itself which seems still to be happening, or to a replaying of the narrative. This can be about rejigging the pieces of the story so as to have a different outcome this time, or to practice endurance should the trauma happen again, or to test one’s response over and over again and gain resilience in the face of it with each replaying of the images. Trauma has a powerful impact.

Each day I feel intense gratitude for my daughter, deep visceral love for her, thankfulness beyond measure that she is in my life. Yet each year I have flashbacks to the trauma of her birth and the danger we were both in – our different dangers – after she emerged; to the terror and psychosis; the misery of feeling unable to cope and be the mother I needed to be; the depression and unutterable loneliness; a vulnerable and precarious state that went on too frighteningly long.

And there is sometimes crippling guilt that the beauty and marvel of life with M is not sufficient to erase this past trauma. But sufficient is the wrong word; trauma isn’t wiped away by lovely things, or eradicated by being replaced with happy experiences. Sadly that is not how trauma works. Trauma affects the body’s system by disrupting the reality of present safety and the knowledge that danger is past and that one survived. What I have learned though, in the seven wonderful years so far of M’s life – and this knowledge is pretty strong now – is that I can allow the traumatic events surrounding her birth, and the beauty and gift that is being her mother to exist in parallel. And that is actually okay. I can’t change the manner of her birth, or the unimaginable awfulness afterwards but I can reassure myself that both M and I survived and that these terrible events ended. I can anchor myself in the safe present by holding my daughter; looking at her sweet and joyous face; by laughing uproariously with her at some ridiculous shared joke; by lying nose to nose in bed with her, each breathing the other’s life-giving breath, feeling our hearts beat in duet. The post-trauma response becomes less powerful when I allow myself not to feel responsibility for it, or guilt that the love of my daughter is not enough to cure me of the intrusive memories. I don’t actually have to feel like an ungrateful beast for being thrown back into a – now fortunately lessened – trauma memory just at the moment I should be celebrating another year of my most precious daughter. I really don’t. Terrible things happen to one and also wonderful, amazing things happen. Two separate, parallel facts of life. In the present I revel in this ebullient girl who is mine, the bright, funny, loving child with whom every day is different, challenging, life affirming, blessed. We did it, we survived, we are safe. Oh gosh how I love her!

It was the worst of times; it was the best of times.