My bestowment of failure and trauma
The problem with trauma is that I never know how to put it into words.
I try and I try but it is ever so difficult to speak a word.
I try to share my story, but it never comes out right.
I try and draw my story, but it isn’t a very good sight.
Instead I will try and tell you how it felt to be in that moment.
To have what felt like everything ripped away from you, my failure of bestowment.
But that is quite literally what happened when your baby is taken out of your arms.
And every single nerve in your body is crying out in alarm.
To have your baby moved hours and hours away,
And laying helplessly and desperately trying to stay awake,
You don’t know what’s happening and nobody has a clue,
Your child isn’t here, and there’s nothing you can do
Because you’re under observation for being very sick
With needles and other instruments giving you a horrid prick,
and you’re laying there, on many different medicines,
‘We can’t control your blood pressure,’ they say, well no doubt you got the message.
You close your eyes to try and take yourself away,
You think of the words, the words your husband whispered to say,
‘You can have anything you want, just please get better’ he said to your son,
And you use that as power to get through the night to see the morning sun
That was just the beginning of the hardships we endured through,
Because after this, all the memories and thoughts sit and stew,
To see something so small and so delicate hooked up in wires,
blood dribbling from their fingertips, ankles, you sit and watch from a burning pyre.
I walk ordinary corridors as if I’m still there,
even if physically I am here, my mind is elsewhere.
The sound of monitors and alarms haunt the core of my dreams,
and no amount of medication has given me any sort of relief.
The panicked cries of doctors resuscitating my son,
Echoing screams of the mother, events that cannot be undone
Even telling myself 1 year on that everything is okay,
My son is healthy, happy and plays all day,
But it’s difficult to separate myself from the past and present,
But hopefully one day I can have dreams once again, more than pleasant
