“‘I say nothing. Nothing until I say everything. But articulating what happened isn’t enough. She’s still married to him. The gap widens…’ Sometimes you can break silences and it doesn’t matter, there’s so much denial you can’t listen.”

She threatened to cut me open, she called in the NICU, whispered to the attending nurses “probably shoulder Dystocia,”and used a vacuum that planted a purple and black bruise on my daughter’s head, like an open dying flower.

I became accustomed to your presence, you were simply the color of my skin that pushed and pulled in every direction and pressed against my ribs. Thick red streaks appeared, long and taut, on my growing belly. I traced their smooth lines with my fingers and tried to rub them away.

It’s the scandalized looks when we’re in public that compel us to parent a little harsher for the benefit of bystanders. We are afraid of what others will think of us, we are afraid we’ve made the wrong choices, and we are afraid that we are not enough.

“I survived trauma by escaping into a world of imagination. I think a lot of us do. We talk about resiliency, but I think we should talk about imagination. A person with an imagination has hope. They can imagine a different future. We can tell a new story of who we are.”

The narrator searches the shadows for the dead and avoids the stares of the living, trapped between worlds and not feeling quite whole in either. When she finally whispers aloud the fear that is keeping her awake, she sleeps for the first time in weeks.

“There was no usual sense of, I’m going into a different world in the writing. I’m staying in the same place where I’m living, and that felt really different; something I wasn’t accustomed to. Sometimes it was empowering, and sometimes it was draining. I felt like I was leaving a lot more of my guts on the page.”