View Six

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Well, I'm Melanie. It happened to me. And I don't remember one bit of it. I was 17 months old according to the story. I grew up hearing that this was the event that God used to indicate what my future would be like. I felt really special and thrilled by hearing this story. I did get tired of hearing about it and having the tears and well-rehearsed narrative. But I think that the story created a context for who I was in God's sight: beloved, used of God, cheerful and someone who rose above the pain of life.

As I got older, I remember that I used to have this recurring, strange fantasy every time I sat down in front of my computer. It was like I'd get a flash of an image in my mind's eye of a deluge of water bursting out of the screen right at me. I'd fight the urge to duck down but realize it was only a mental picture that wasn't based on anything real.
There were other things about me that I wondered about. For example, I absolutely hate going to bed at night. It's not like I'm afraid or worried, or thinking about anything in particular. I just feel like I'm being punished, to have to be in a bed all alone and have no one else around. I used to argue with my mother about how I should be allowed to stay awake longer. I would do anything to stay awake. After my parents realized that even with lights out kinds of rules, I'd still get up and creep around upstairs in my room, they bought me a light for my headboard so I could read. It would just be my responsibility to get up on time in the morning. Nothing could have made me happier. I read voraciously at night with my door closed, mostly religious books. When I got into my 30s, my staying awake late was to the point of being ridiculous. Why sleep? I would be tired, but I'd fight and fight to stay awake. Why, on earth?

One day I was reading a book about the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. The author, a psychiatrist, described all the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in children: grim, joyless, repetitive play; magical thinking; the sense of a foreshortened future; daytime fantasies involving something related to the trauma. I put down the book and called my mother. What really happened? Something much bigger than God using me had happened and I wanted to know what it was. Indeed, something much bigger had happened.

Mother told me that when I came home from the hospital, I was dazed and withdrawn for at least six months. That was the first time I had heard this, and I was 39! She said that it was hard to engage me emotionally and I seemed removed from what was going on around me. I asked if she ever considered taking me to the doctor or a psychiatrist or something. No. Back then, people only went to psychiatrists if they were a bona fide crazy person. "We just hoped that you'd get over it and we ignored it."

Why had she been running steaming water in a bathtub in a house with two children under the age of five? Had I been left alone in the hospital for any length of time? She said that I hadn't, but as we talked, I had vague recollection of being in a white enamel crib--one with a lid on it. I couldn't get out and I remember--in another flash-type memory--looking down a long empty corridor and wondering where everyone was and why I had to be there all alone. I must equate going to bed with being all alone in that crib. Why is it that so many people love to retreat to a nice, soft bed to drift in and out of sleep in the middle of an afternoon? I'd rather have my toenails pulled out with hot pincers! Why? Because it was reminiscent of being in pain, being alone, abandoned. Being in bed feels punishing and I avoid it.

What really stood out for me was the sense of a foreshortened future. I never could picture myself as a parent or teenager, or an adult. It was like there was no picture in my head of an older Melanie. Just a blank where the future should be. I even thought about this phenomenon when I was an preteen.

It's interesting too, that I found myself at one point in my life, taking care of injured babies. I would go completely nuts if I felt that the children were afraid or treated in less than a sensitive, attentive manner by the caretakers. My reaction seemed out of proportion to the event. There it was again. Heightened psychological and physiological arousal in response to a reminder of the traumatic event.
I had also heard somewhere that many very first memories in traumatized people are tied to traumatic events. What is my first memory of life (beside the flash-view of being in a crib with a lid on it)? It is of being held by my father, with my little bottom in his big hands, me leaning against his chest and his face against mine. He is lowering me down into the bathtub for the first time after I got home from the hospital. He was saying sweet, gentle things to me so I wouldn't get scared, and I was putting my feet in the water in the bathtub. I looked up and saw what seemed like a mile of white tiles on the wall. I wasn't afraid. I smelled Phisohex and heard his voice rumbling in his chest, against my back.

Oh.

I also had an exaggerated startle response, was hypervigilant, and quite anxious about a number of world events. When a person with PTSD doesn't get treatment, every other thing that causes anxiety piggybacks onto the original trauma, until their response to a frightening stimulus is extraordinary.

I read and re-read the book, thinking about myself, examining what I knew to be true about my responses to life. I had PTSD. That was what I came away from this story with. What I couldn't get over was how I'd been given "the party line" about God doing something wonderful through me. I've even told this story in sermons and church retreats. I do believe that God was very gracious and that I've learned from this story that one doesn't even need to be sensient in order to be used by God. Even the rocks will sing out if no one else praises God--if need be. So He used me--a tiny little 17-month old child. And I still got PTSD and my attachment and abandonment issues germinated in that traumatic event.

It is important to know the whole story or else someone will sell you a whitewashed version of it that somehow supports who they are, while ignoring the impact of it on you. Good thing I found out the truth about myself. It has made all the difference. You also can't let something define you that you know nothing about and that you don't remember. Get out there and make your life what you want it to be. Be defined by what you do and how you treat other people. You just can't rest on the definitions of life or yourself that other people give you.