Libraries of Trauma


The thing about trauma is that if you don’t get it out and identify it as trauma, you risk continuing to cope with trauma simply because you might not have the sense to recognize that’s what it is.


My mother hated being alone in my apartment. It was so funny how our circumstances had reversed. As a little girl, I was the one who hated being alone in the apartment, but she’d had too much going on to be with me. And now she wanted to finally be with me, but I had things to do.


I was just beginning to heal the trauma of my past. I was busy with acupuncture and chakra alignment; self-help classes, therapy, silent meditations and every other kind of spiritual modality I could think of.


I was trying to make sense of the pain and discomfort I kept experiencing, that kept the biggest parts of myself constrained so tight and locked so deep inside myself.


And then I’d return to my apartment and see my mother so drunk. When she drank to drown things out, she meant business. She was in and out of the hospital half a dozen times that year.


But she’d still deny it. Even when I’d find her bottle, she’d refuse to admit it.


I rarely pressed the issue. Maybe because I knew

that feeling of needing to escape. I just chose a different route than her.


There was this one day though. When I caught her coming out of the liquor store, a bottle in a bag.


I was in the car, driving. Chris was with me.


There’s this feeling of power mixed with betrayal to catch someone at something. To experience their vulnerability and yours crossing paths. I find it’s moments like these that decide a person’s character. Do you feel better than? Do you feel sad for? Do you want to be there for? Do you want to help? Do you want to detach and process what you’ve witnessed with another? Make it about you?


In my case I slideshowed through every one of these. That’s one way to cope with trauma. Covering all the bases. I had gotten pretty dexterous at juggling all these lenses at once. I just hadn’t realized yet the impact of never being able to relax while you’re keeping your eye on all of them.


I remember my mother looked so fiery walking with her bottle. And yet so small and haggard.

She was ignoring me; speed-walking next to the car.


She stormed up the stairs and into my apartment.

And Chris and I walked in moments after.


I found my mother sitting at the table in the veranda. I forget the words I used to bring up the drinking. But this time instead of pretending it hadn’t been the case, she pulled out her bottle from the bag and started swigging from it.


It was so startling. Like the time I saw her naked by accident when I was little. It seemed so wrong to witness something so unfamiliar, something I shouldn’t have been allowed to see.


I kept silent. And Chris kept silent too. He was always so quiet and shut down when my mother was having one of her moments. And then my mother looked at me with this condescending fierceness. “You’re such a pussy, Jessica,” she said.


It didn’t sting when she said it. I took it with the same grain of humor that I always kept to myself. I was used to her episodes, and used to not taking her words literally. Mostly because I understood them from her context.


I’d always pretended to be a little less sharp than I was to give her the upper hand. Because I knew she needed it. Nobody else in this world was going to give her one. And I knew that what she was trying to tell me was that I had no idea the hell she experienced that made her drink. And she was right.


She sipped more from her bottle and I glanced at Chris who looked like a statue of himself and I looked back at my mother with love. And sadness.


Really, we were so close. She knew that I knew what was going on. All of it.


And she started to cry.


“I just want to be here for you. For once in my fucking life. To be here for my daughter. And it’s too late.”


She was crying so hard she couldn’t speak.


“You have been here for me. We’ve been here for each other,” I said.

But I doubt she heard me under all her tears.


Eventually she lit a cigarette.


“I’ll never forgive myself, Jessica.”


“It’s not your fault,” I said, knowing she was talking about her condition. Whether it was a chip in her brain or some unnamed neurodivergence, it didn’t much matter. Whatever it was, it was the stuff that put her always on the front lines of the battle she fought, with little time leftover for anything else.


“I forgive you,” I said.


And it was true. For all the largeness of her mistakes, I still preferred my mother to those others in my life with their varieties of functionality. Those people with purpose who kept themselves so closed up and so safe that they were unable to perceive the subtlety of a moment unless it literally grabbed for their attention and spelled itself out.


My mother was raw. Dangerous. Brilliant. Flawed. And she was open. She saw the world from a top floor perspective but had no skills to function on the ground. She let it all in and filtered it out through her own palette. Often a warped palette, from being so traumatized herself. But I worshipped the art she made. Even when it hurt.


“When you were little, Jessica...

We were still living on Community Drive.

We were on the second floor of that house. There was a balcony. I heard a voice. It said to throw you over that balcony. I lifted you up. But I didn’t listen. I placed you back down on the floor instead.”


Hearing her confess this was the strangest thing.

Not only because Chris was right there listening. But because for years I’d had this weird memory that kept surfacing. I’d written about it before. But never knew why I kept coming up with this same image:


I was looking over a balcony. Seeing things that were small. I thought they were airplanes. I thought my mother was showing me. In another scene, I was looking over a balcony. There were little cars down there. I thought my mother was showing them to me.


It was just a few seconds of time but yet, hearing that it happened, that what I’d internalized in essence had originated in reality, gave me a powerful shift: that the things that have stayed with me, happened to me. In fact having that one moment be validated helped me begin to heal all the other things I never gave time to validate because I didn’t know I mattered enough to be sure my experience counted as real.


“It’s ok,” I said to my mother.

“We’re here now.

I love you.”


Trauma is so powerful. We really are libraries of it. From lives past and present.


But the biggest problem isn’t the trauma. It’s discarding the trauma, because no one was there to experience it but you. And who are you anyway?


To own your place in your life is to own that your trauma happened. No matter how old you were. No matter how many seconds the event lasted. No matter if the trauma kept happening so long, it just seemed like the cards you were dealt.

You deserve to feel your pain and heal it.


Last night in my insomnia I was thinking about what my thing is. The thing that gives me the greatest sense of myself. And it’s always been the same thing—understanding myself, people and circumstances through writing.


I was hearing my mother in my heart during that conversation with myself. So I asked her, “What was your thing?”

And she said, “It was you honey. You were my everything.”


-JLK