Many Days Surviving Trauma Is The Most One Can Do (Why That Has To Be Enough Today)
Trigger Warning: Child abuse referenced.
Loneliness. For child abuse survivors loneliness drives us into some of the greatest disasters of our lives. I once thought it was fear. I realize now it’s the fear of loneliness.
There’s a little girl inside of me with her face buried in her arms, pulling her knees to her chest. She’s frozen there, at seven years old, because she knows what I’ve only recently accepted, that her mother does not love her.
Not even I can get her to look at me. I don’t know if she has a face.
I used to think she hid her face in shame. For the longest time, I believed it was fear. It’s not that she doesn’t feel those things or that they don’t contribute to her isolation, but it’s loneliness at not having a mother, her mother, that devastated her.
For me, the grownup, it feels useless to grieve the loss of my mother because, as this little girl knows, we’ve been grieving her loss our entire lives. I just finally started paying attention.
I’m fostering three cats who were emotionally neglected for the first year of their lives. They came to me because I’ve been successful with tough foster cat cases before. Between you and me, I think I’ve just gotten lucky, but between you and me, I’ve also worked very hard to reach them. Many fosters I know don’t even name their kittens and others forget about them. I treat them like people, no better. I treat them like they deserve love long before they may know how to recognize it.
It’s been three months and I still can barely touch two of them, but one of them, dear reader, I’ve fallen head over heels for. He had no reason to bond with me, he just did, without much prompting within the first week of his stay. And every moment I’m with him is heavenly. I can’t think about abandoning him after what he’s been through. I can’t think about the possibility that someone else will let him down. If I give him up, I’m just…
