The boys came home to my parent’s house on Thanksgiving Day, 2013. Tiger met them shortly afterward. Soon, she started carting about two baby dolls everywhere she went, named Lemon and Orange. She also knew how to disassemble and reassemble my entire breastpump, and would sometimes hook it up to her baby’s chests, so they could nurse too.
I have a picture of her sitting on the floor between them in carseats, reading them a book. She turned four that December. I have another picture of me and Tiger sitting at a miniature table playing with Play-Doh. I am holding one of the twins, and the other is sitting on the floor next to us in his infant seat.
These were some of my favorite times in my life.
I eventually moved into the apartment downstairs, and shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with PTSD. I was lucky enough to find a trauma therapist who was certified in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which is a treatment for PTSD, so I started treatment.
I was still having a lot of flashbacks, nightmares, and panic attacks, but now I had no relief, because I wasn’t drinking. I was also experiencing what’s known as hypervigilance, where I thought that if I didn’t monitor my children and watch over them 24 hours a day, even when they were sleeping, they would surely die. I was exhausted and barely sleeping, which made the PTSD symptoms worse.
Therapy was also bringing up a lot of issues with my mother, so processing those events was making me get really angry with her. My mother wasn’t a very good mother to me growing up. She never hugged or kissed me or told me I was loved, and she was physically abusive at times. She also didn’t believe that my step-brother had sexually abused me. Her response when I told her was, “Well, that’s what YOU say,” as if I had made it up.
Because of this, every time she would make a suggestion or criticize me about how I was taking care of my three children, I would become enraged. Like–the worst mother was giving ME parenting advice?? What planet am I on?!
Needless to say, living with her did not go well.
Also, Jaxon turned out to have reflux, colic, and asthma, so he was either puking, screaming, or having trouble breathing all of the time. I had rushed him to the doctor’s office more times than I could count that first year, and he was finally formally diagnosed with asthma at Geisinger Hospital, and treated with nebulizer treatments every four hours around the clock.
Like I said–I was exhausted.
The fighting with my parents got bad enough that I moved into my own apartment when the boys were nine months old. I didn’t have any money, but by this time I was on food stamps, WIC, and HUD, so I moved out. The government assistance was never enough, but I couldn’t imagine working at some minimum wage job and having someone else raise my kids–I couldn’t have afforded it anyway.
Life was hard.
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