by Sandra Wiebe
My parents had cases of photographic slides in an old suitcase, and I finally got around to getting them scanned. This sweet gem was among the images of cousins, birthday parties, and long-forgotten camping vacations.
This poorly composed image, in which I uncommonly still have my head, is captured in the photographic style of my mother. Here, I look wildly content as I pose squint-eyed into the sun with patchy snow at my feet and a low winter’s shadow behind me.
Our backyard was our playground. Most of the time you’d find me and my brothers out on the hill, regardless of the temperature, after school, Saturdays and even Sundays (after church, of course). That old ringer-washer lid was my favourite makeshift toboggan. It made the ride fast and unpredictable, even out of control.
The dog would make chase, barking frantically alongside us down the slopes, tugging at the pant legs of our snowsuits, never tiring of any of it. Winter meant snow forts, snowmen, sledding, snowball fights, and my birthday.
(The following short story is a piece of my childhood, one of beautiful memories but also a glimpse into the trauma that is so common to many. The point in sharing is that trauma has a way of waiting until midlife to remind us of our unhealed parts, it is the reason I became a therapist at aged 58. We heal in community, we heal in the light, secrets keep us stuck in pain and shame.)
A Winter Birthday
The snow fell all night, strong and steady. My eyes were glued to the outdoors through the wet windowpane; its peeling paint and frost forming. The snow piled up high and I felt giddy.
My childhood home, perched on the edge of a ravine, provided an excellent hill in the winter for sledding for me and my siblings, the dog, and sometimes an occasional neighbour.
Winter and daily sledding would be in full swing by the time my birthday rolled around in February.
A few days before every birthday my mother would get out the special birthday cake book. Its corners were tattered from the years of past birthday celebrations. A few pages stuck together. The book smelled of icing sugar.
There were penguins, snowmen, clowns, and trucks to choose from, so many possibilities. I took my time turning each crusty page. It was this one day I felt free, these were my choices. Today it was all about me.
The day came and my brothers and I gathered up the sleds, the old ringer-washer lid, shovels and even bits of cardboard to prepare for the afternoon. The toboggan hill had only a few gentle areas where the boys hadn’t piled up snow for runs and jumps. The all too short, but steep hill ended abruptly at a barbed wire fence. This required either expert navigation or a skilled and sudden self-evacuation from the ride.
How often I wondered if those rides taught me ways of survival. I turned 52 the year I received a letter without warning, without a return address. It was brief, stunted in its efforts to extend an apology – the only letter my father had ever sent me.
I was special, he said. The same phrase he offered up with each inappropriate childhood encounter. The same words that came with the knowing that I had to find a way to endure what always came next.
I began trauma therapy for the first time after that letter. Fight, flight or freeze. I came to understand that as a child I couldn’t fight back, I had nowhere to flee, and so freezing meant survival.
Reciprocating with a written reply to my aging and deaf father provided a chance to thaw from my silence, a silence that protected him, never me.
My mother, blind from macular degeneration, took nearly three months to respond with a phone call under the pretext of wishing me a happy birthday. Blind to her own scars, she proceeded to rant. She offered no empathy, no apology, only an insistence that I should let go of this grudge.
The wind was knocked from me as if I hit frozen ground, the wooden sled splintering. My whole body shivered as I looked up and saw the barbed wire before me.
The truth is, experiences like this shape who we are and leave us feeling stuck, lost, confused, emotional, and numb. But you are not alone, and we can take steps together to face the past and find ourselves here in the present moment, living a rich and meaningful life.
Let’s start this journey together, book a consult call.
