Week 28: The nightmares, they are back…

27 weeks, 6 days.

(Ed. note: 11/17/2007 – This is a backdated post. It will never appear on my front page, nor do I need it to. It has been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time because while this has been a significant part of my life’s experience for the last several months (decades, actually, though the part about it involving a baby is new), at the time I wrote this, I was being very careful to keep the stupid drama going on in my real life as quiet as possible. I was sincerely hoping that the participants would settle down and get on with their lives and leave us alone. When they didn’t, and when I continued to have such nightmares and it became clear that those relationships were well and truly over, I decided that I was really OK with posting it. It’s nothing but the truth, and it’s important to no one but me, but I find that the more open I am about all of this, the more power I have to change it. I am willing to live with the consequences of my actions here. Caveat lector.)

I’ve had a pleasant few weeks of sleep, to the best of my recollection (needing to roll over again and again onto the other side because one side is sore from Small Monster’s home’s weight aside, of course), but it seems that the crappy nightmares are still there. I don’t remember most of my dreams of late because I’m sleeping so well, but occasionally I’ll have such a deep, believable nightmare that I’ll wake myself up screaming from it (this morning I was crying and screaming and moaning, and because I’m sleeping in the living room due to belly hugeness issues, unfortunately there was no Christian to cuddle and soothe me back to sleep). It’s pretty horrible.

I find that these nightmares usually ruin my morning – really ruin it, because they’re so real they might as well have happened, and it’s very hard to shake off something traumatic right after it’s “happened”. I’ll be honest here – though these particular nightmares started with my pregnancy, since some rather significant trauma also happened at the same time we announced the pregnancy, there’s really no way to tell what combination of factors actually is causing these things. I can only say that even though these nightmares really require no interpretation – they’re variations on a theme from a part of my life where I was absolutely powerless to escape someone else’s uncontrolled rage and behavior, and the one person who could have helped did not – I would give just about anything (my firstborn and husband excepted) to make them go away. I have a very good therapist, so it’s not as if I have no one to talk to about them, but I am a little tired of waking up feeling absolutely sick to my stomach because something I worked very hard to get away from – and have finally succeeded – still continues to torment me in my sleep.

It is, perhaps, because for the first time in my life, after some time in therapy and a whole lot of talking to deal with recent drama, there is a name for all of these things that happened. That may not sound like a big deal, but when a situation you simply can’t make sense of has been hurting for years, finding out that there is indeed a name for it and that its definition fits so eerily well that you really cannot deny that this must be what it is, there is a sense of tumultuous freedom associated with that. It hurts, but there is a release of sorts. That there are well-defined symptoms and behaviors to describe what went on at the time is an oddly wonderful thing, though it’s been a period of (often painful) reflection and attempts to understand why what happened happened. Instead of rationalizing things, instead of sitting back and saying “yes, it was horrible, but he/she only did it because that person had a difficult childhood/never had good role models/whatever” (and thus downplaying the fact that while all of these things are true, it neither excuses them nor diminishes the fact that they were painful, emotional violations of trust), I am finally able to sit down for the first time in my adult life and say “that was – and is – bloody awful, and I have the right to do what I need to do to stop it from continuing”. It’s not a matter of blaming the person with the symptoms and behaviors, although he/she is certainly the only one who could do anything about it – it’s just been a matter of being able to sit back and say, “no, this did happen, and to try to pretend that this doesn’t impact who I am and how I’ve learned to deal with other people and situations to avoid being told that I ‘have a chip on my shoulder’ is downright ridiculous and ignorant.”

And so all of a sudden I’m remembering a whole lot of things I’d put away in boxes under lock and key, and it all appears in my nightmares. I must tell you that if the person (actually, let’s be fair here – people) involved in the situation were to read this, I’d be told that it wasn’t so bad, that I’m remembering it wrong, that I’m so melodramatic, that I am, as ever, the person to blame… and the person/people involved might well read this. The last time one of them read something in my blog that bothered him/her, that person actually created an entire pseudonymous persona (right down to having had a fictitious child with genetic difficulties that died! I shit you not…) to try to “send a message” – God knows what that message was actually supposed to be, because the only message I got from that was “that is some kind of fucked up”, but in any event, that’s the kind of thing I can expect if I ever talk about these things, and so for so much of my life I have not. And because I do not, they rear their ugly heads while I sleep, and I am trying very very hard to just deal with them finally.

I’m still trying to find a balance between what I can say publicly about this and what I can’t – there is a big difference between describing events and how they impact you and maliciously trying to air dirty laundry, and while I’d never intentionally do the latter, I know that whatever I say will be perceived that way by these people, and figuring out how to deal with that without engaging them is pretty damned messy. On the one hand, the kinds of things other people in the same situation have said to me about their experiences has been incredibly, incredibly liberating – I finally feel like I’m not alone in my own head over what happened, and that I’m not smoking crack when I’m able to say to myself that what I remember really did happen, and that I don’t have to accept a rewritten version of history – or, more importantly, the present – just to not rock the boat, because my boat got rocked all over the damned place when I was keeping my mouth shut and letting people reshape reality for me to keep the peace, and the only person who can stop allowing that is me. I have had to, in the past several months since my pregnancy started, end some relationships and, as a result, severely restrict others that are very, very important to me. It has been a bloody painful time all by itself, and to be honest, I was really worried in the first three months that I might miscarry because of it; thankfully, Small Monster seems determined to be born, and to be honest, it’s mostly for him that I’m doing all of this internal housekeeping so that I can be a good, present parent. Now that the main shock and pain of it all is past, I’m left with these nightmares, mostly about being forced back into that situation and not being able to assert myself enough to get out of it.

The nightmares, at least, vanish sometime the next day, and I do wake up in a house where I am absolutely loved in spite of and for all of my faults; I have made a much better life for myself, and I am not feeling guilty about that any longer. It’s just that first thing in the morning, pulling myself back to this reality is a little tough, and the tendency to have “bad pregnancy dreams” fueling the nightmares on is making this tougher than it needs to be.