recalling the mind/body connection, reflections on the first target memory.

i wrote this one after an EMDR session earlier this month & was reflecting back on it. all of the things i've been reprocessing around my adoption have been so so surreal & heartbreaking & enlightening & messy. it's such a process, to dive into oneself and relive the days, weeks, & months i so strategically blocked out. to be in my body after i've spent all this time trying not to feels like resisting a homecoming because how does one make a home out of a vessel deemed unhinabitable? 

this session brought to light the way my insomniac habits originated in the dark. both literally and figuratively. i've never been good at falling asleep, for fear of my nightmares, my racing thoughts, the fact that despite it all, there is still a peaceful solitude about the nighttime, & the way i still long for a someone who will never return. i'm talking about that primal ache i first felt all those years ago when the adult caretakers said "oh, just let the baby cry it out, she needs to learn how to self soothe." & i did, both learn how to cry it out and self soothe but i also learned that no one was coming to get me & that i would be on my own from that moment on. 

that's not to say that i am inherently without support but rather that the mother wound is one that cannot be healed overnight. it doesn't suddenly close once you become aware of it or are assimilated into a new family via adoption or other means. she is everywhere i am. 

my EMDR therapist likes to ask me to turn on the lights in that first initial memory. what do you see? how does it feel? i'm uncomfortable. it's too bright. paper mache baby goes quiet. that small dark room wasn't where the trauma happened. the trauma happened in the initial surrender and then again, in the displacement in that 15 hour flight and the days following. the trauma was that it happened at all.

i'm not okay with it but acceptance is settling in. i can trace a line back 26 years and identify the moment my habits were born. i still hear her cry at night. i still hear her silences. when i lie awake at night, my bones sit with the knowing of something i am not fond of remembering and yet, we are still tethered. i am the manifestation of my ancestors, in all of their grief and joy.