Twelve years ago today, I woke and found myself in a nightmare. I woke and found that the person I thought I’d spend my life with was all out of life to live. In the same moment the terror set in, the phone rang. It was Sara. Ed was late meeting her to go up to the hospital to see her mom go in for back surgery. I don’t remember these moments vividly, but she describes my screams that morning as one of the most terrifying things she’s ever heard.

He was rushed to the hospital and we saw a glimmer of hope. Sara and I followed; I was 20. I literally brought my childhood stuffed animal, Sad Sam, with me to the emergency room. The Chaplin met us in the waiting room and asked if we were “next of kin.” I didn’t know what that meant. Sara did. We weren’t next of kin. Or we weren’t yet. Emerson wasn’t even a flutter yet. But Ed was gone.

The trauma of  this day is like no other trauma I’ve ever experienced. I went back to work about a week after Ed died. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t watch TV. I didn’t want to watch any show that he hadn’t seen. Pope John Paul II died a couple months after Ed died and I couldn’t believe the world was turning and changing in ways he’d never get to know.

I contemplated whether my pregnancy was the true blessing I believed it to be or a cursed reminder of what I’d lost. I woke up from recurring dreams where Ed was alive and for a moment believed it was true before blaring consciousness took over.

For months, I would sob uncontrollably on my drive to and from work while listening to terribly sad songs on repeat. I cried myself to sleep every night. Sara let her pug dog Gandolph sleep with me;  he would stare at me in sweet confusion and try to lick my face. I distinctly remember thinking one sunny day, while driving down highway 50, “this can’t be my life! I can’t be pregnant and alone!”

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One day my dad and I went out to lunch at Marina Gardens downtown. My dad said “this loss is something you’ll never get over. This is something that will stay with you forever.” I instinctively resisted this idea. This couldn’t be true.

My dad experienced extreme trauma at a young age. His ex-wife absconded with his first child when she was only three years old. He was utterly broken by this. He didn’t reconnect with her until she called him on the phone at age 16, the same year I was born.

In his despair, he didn’t turn to drugs or alcohol to escape. He turned his grief inward. He turned his trauma into a biting self-criticism that made him outwardly abrasive and gruff towards most people. He wore heavy boots.

My dad allowed this early trauma to control him, to eat away at him, recluse him, hold him back, and drive him to an early grave. He let his trauma depress him at Christmas time as he recounted all the Christmases he spent without his first born.

As a mother, I can’t imagine the helplessness and despair he felt in that loss. Even as a child, I empathized with his loss and loyally stood with him  under his rain cloud abiding in his pain.

His trauma kept him from trusting there was good in the world and good in his life- except as it pertained to me.

Though our relationship was clouded by the shadows of his trauma, he was able to set aside his grief to love me.  It was physically and emotionally difficult for him to say “I love you” to me. I could see it in the tightening of his eyes and the quiver in his voice every time he said it. His love for me made him uncomfortably vulnerable and open to repeat trauma. Yet, he made a choice to say it to me often. He made a choice to trust me with his love.

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People often say that life does not hand you more than you can handle. A lot of people marvel at how well I handled trauma at such a young age. My dad taught me how to not handle trauma. But my dad also taught me that love can conquer all- if you choose to let it.

To combat my despair, I threw myself into loving Emerson. That I knew how to do, if there were a million other things I didn’t know how to do yet- like budget money, wash the dishes regularly, and manage toddler egos….#stilllearning

I stopped crying myself to sleep because I replaced thoughts of loving and losing Ed with thoughts of gaining and loving Emerson. I stopped dwelling on the ruins of my previous plans and started making plans for the future. I knew that I couldn’t let a rain cloud hang above Emerson’s childhood the way my dad let his rain cloud hang over us. I couldn’t walk beside Emerson in heavy boots. I couldn’t ask him to abide in my despair.

We all want to give our children better childhoods than we had. My goal was to raise children to adulthood with as little emotional damage as possible- to give them two unbroken and stable parents. When Ed died before Emerson was even born, I thought I’d already failed. I thought he’d be a little broken from the start. But twelve years later, I don’t think that’s true.

We have a family therapist because #everyoneneedstherapy. When I described how I cope with trauma by setting it aside, she called this “compartmentalizing”. She didn’t make a comment about whether it was a “healthy” method of coping but it seems to work for me. I never forgot the trauma I experienced that day. But I chose to not let it define my course.

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When Emerson lost his grandma three years ago, I really worried about how it would affect him. He was so close to her. He loved her so much and her death was unexpected and swift. He was appropriately sad for a period of time, but he didn’t dwell. He talks about her with a smile and his memories are not melancholy. His boots are not heavy.

Trauma can swallow you whole. My trauma is not nearly as extensive as the trauma many people have experienced and we are all equipped with different coping mechanisms and mental faculties. But part of trauma is a choice. I am prone to obsessing and over-analyzing. If I hadn’t seen my dad cope with trauma and made a decision to know better and do better, I might have let my early trauma overtake me as well. If I hadn’t been surrounded by people willing to support me, my success might have been tripped up by the very trauma I was trying to escape.

When I say I’m lucky, it’s because I acknowledge that a perfect storm made me able to look back twelve years later and know, with 100% certainty, I decidedly escaped my facticity.

So, if you woke today and found yourself in the midst of a nightmare, I understand. If your boots are too heavy to move, I understand. Move them anyway. If you’re going through hell, keep on going. Because, in twelve years from now (or less), you might find yourself reveling in what dreams have come while only hazily remembering the nightmare and trauma you chose to neatly set on the shelf.