Should we choose to remember?

Our hidden traumas need to come out into the light of day.. I read something about shame a while back that said that giving that dark stuff or hidden feelings and secrets, compost light and air helps us and this is a subject on my mind today as I start finally to begin to be getting some distance from the multiple woundings and traumas I endured over the years of my active addiction 1979 to 1993.. Part of that history is something I have read on other blogs people consider a ‘sin’. I am talking here about the painful and devisive issue of abortion or terminations of pregnancy.. Part of my story of active addiction and being a neglected child was a painful legacy of shame around 6 aborted pregnancies. As I look back falling pregnant at the age of 21 in many ways I was naive and ignorant child.. I remember when my mother tried to have a conversation about sex with me in about 1979 I fobbed her off in some way.. And then 4 or so years later when she came to my house one day without notice and walked in without knocking to find me in bed with my then partner she gave me the silent treatment for about a week. I then got a lecture on the evils of my ways.

That made things so much worse when I finally fell pregnant to my then boyfriend Jim a few months later. I hid the truth of that pregnancy from everyone except my boyfriend and flat mate.. Later on, when I got sober I started to work through the 6 terminations of pregnancy I had from 1983 to 1993.. And I well remember when I went to an appointment with the overseer of the Cambridge Jungian Therapists when my husband and I moved to the UK in 1999 at 6 years of sobriety and told her she spoke about the issue of soul murder.

Now I see that at the time all of these things went down I was just so very disconnected and unconscious on so many levels. In fact my therapist Kat believes that from the time of my massive MVA trauma in September 1979 my soul was in many ways outside of my body and dissociated.. Maybe this explains the reason why I kept on repeating such a painful ‘mistake’ 6 times. At the time I did not take the necessary precautions and that is a painful metaphor for my lack of boundaries, self love and self care.

I have chosen to share here on my blog emergingfromthedarknight about only one of the very difficult terminations I had on he first anniversary of my father’s death in 1986. That occurred while I was in Switzerland and at that time I know my mother was very concerned about me still being so far away from home.. She had found out about the two earlier terminations after my father died in January 1985 and she had not only confronted me but attacked, shamed and blamed me too about them.. I well remember we had a big fight about it a few days after we had buried Dad and I had had to catch a field mouse after he died and release its body back to nature.. After that she urged me to travel overseas alone..

I feel that I have now come to terms with the pain of those terminations and also with the issue of shame and having to bury the truth until I found a way to speak of them after getting sober in 1993. There is a saying in AA that I take very seriously “we are only as sick as our secrets”. I also believe if we do not bring them out into the light of day we will continue to suffer.

I worked through each one by writing a letter for each and to the baby that I named about 9 years after getting sober.. And then I addressed another letter to the oldest or first baby/soul I chose to terminate in 2004. I keep these letters in a lovely voile underwear bag that my mother gave to me many years ago in my underwear drawer.

According to the angel intuitive Lorna Byrne the souls of terminated babies understand that their soul contract was not to be borne. They stay close in spirit to and love the mother still. They do not blame her.. They understand. Sadly some in society do not do this and ideally we would live in a world where every baby was wanted and could be born to parents who could give that child what it needed.. But sadly this world is not ideal and it is full of trauma..Reading in Lorna’s book Angels In My Hair that the soul sees, knows and understand brings me love, healing and peace.

I thought today that being ‘all in the past’ it may not be useful to share about these traumas any more but then another part of me wanted to honor the process of how I worked through these losses.. So below are the two pieces of writing I did in trying to address the loss of my first unborn baby Prema in January 1984. I share this for others who may have chosen to terminate a child and to bring the issue out into the light of day.. I know some will judge me for this but I have to stand by it all.. This is all part of my past.. That said it does not need to affect my present or future any more.. I feel the more chances we have to speak about it the more we can feel and release what we need to leave in the past but will never the less forever remain a very pivotal part of our earthly lived human experience.

Dear Prema

my first beautiful baby, you would be 18 this year if you had been bought to term I am so sorry at that time my life was very mixed up, I was struggling with so many things, insecurity, depression not really knowing my real self, drinking and using drugs I was so frightened when I found out I was pregnant I did not believe I could trust to tell any one The only people who knew were Jayne and Jim. I kept it a secret from work – told the lie that I was ill on the day we had to drive to Sydney for the procedure due to there being at that time no clinics in Canberra. Today I honestly feel so sad about it and I would be lying to say I have no regrets and yet I did what I thought was right at the time for both of us. I only know I need to lay to rest any lingering feelings of guilt or shame, so that I can get on with the rest of my life. I have to let it all go as part of my path, but your soul and the experience of this will always live in my memory and a touch of sadness for what could have been may always, possibly still remain. I will never forget.

I wrote thus second letter in my recovery journal on 1 March 2004.

For many weeks leading up to and after Christmas I was feeling sick and so I went to the doctor. Jim and I had probably been going out for a little over 4 months – the doctor after examining me and finding nothing wrong asked if I could be pregnant. It had not even occurred to me, I was so naive at that point and even dissociated I think due to all my trauma. I lied to work as we had to travel 4 hours by car to go to the city where a termination was possible. I remember feeling scared and the protesters outside yelling as we passed.

Later after it was over we drove hours to the coast to some friends of Jim’s I barely even knew, of course we told them nothing, it was a dark lonely night.

All of these years later I remember it with sadness, even thought this felt like the most responsible choice, I never dared tell my parents but Mum found out after Dad died. The way she reacted made me feel so rejected and alone, so it all was covered over until all these years later as I take the active choice to remember, release and grieve it. Please forgive me. Even though somewhere deep in my heart my higher power tells me I did nothing wrong, it gets confusing at times.