Mom remarries and relocates us to farm life in east-central, rural Minnesota when I am eight. Those years are defined by hard labor, harsh discipline, emotional volatility, and deep poverty. Dad remarries as well, establishing a new family where my brother and I exist on the periphery.

Throughout, the memories stay at bay. Yet my body continues to carry that weight while navigating new environments, boundary issues with family members, contact with my uncle, and self-touch that is both familiar and confusing. None of it registers as unusual, and today that time remains hazy while my body’s sensations are intact.

In my later teens and early adulthood, the buried trauma persists: I dissociate during my first sexual experience, turn to alcohol to numb myself, and engage in risky encounters, all while embodying an unrelenting dread of the dark.

Questioning any of it never occurs.

Yet with some resolve, at twenty-three, in spring 1993, I travel to Great Britain with my brother, and it becomes a turning point where I recognize I need to take charge of my life.

That fall, I meet my soon-to-be husband. We form an immediate, intense connection, and when I marry him in September 1997, I feel safe and have hope for a stable life. Yet early on, our relationship becomes clouded by his jealousy, my fear of abandonment, and our consistent arguments, activating my tucked away trauma.

Becoming a mother pushes it even further to the surface.

After my daughter is born by emergency c-section, I become overprotective without understanding the reasons behind it. A subsequent miscarriage through a D&C and a type-one diabetes diagnosis during my final pregnancy bring about additional distress, reinforcing my sense that what happens to my body is not up to me. My son is born healthy, but rather than providing support for each other within that relief, emotional distance appears between my husband and me.

In spring 2002, additional triggers accumulate. My husband moves our bedroom to the unfinished basement where a large closet ignites my body’s signals. A later visit to my childhood home, now owned by my uncle, heightens the reactions as fragments of that house’s unfinished basement and the large closet in what used to be my bedroom emerge.

Before leaving, I see myself in the full-length mirror that had been there since I was young. But there are two of me: my thirty-two-year-old self and my four-year-old self. However, that girl does not resemble who I usually envision. She is disheveled and very, very sad.

I dismiss everything and go on with life as usual, unaware the triggers are stacking and my concealed trauma is teetering.  

Then, on May 6, 2002, my daughter turns four.

In the days that follow, the memories flood.

I remember.

My uncle on top of me in the closet. My uncle hurting me in the basement and in the living room where the full-length mirror stood.

In the wake, I struggle to process the deeds and their damage. Within, my marriage further deteriorates. Rather than being there beside me, my husband responds with anger and disregard. The security I once felt vanishes, and I withdraw.

At the same time, I move toward understanding.

I enter counseling and turn to writing to process my past.

As I work toward healing, I tell my parents, leave my marriage, and return to therapy and EMDR, where I recognize my own capacity to protect myself.

I continue the work to integrate the four-year-old I once kept hidden.

And I know there is more to be done — starting with confronting my uncle.