Love What Hurts

When I awoke from that dream, I knew there was a correlation between my father, my abused childhood, and my inability to get pregnant. I knew I had to see him. It wasn’t logical, but my intuition just knew and my body felt calm with this idea. This didn’t sit too well with my tribe. “Why do you need to see him? Why do you want to open up that can of worms? Why would you create this kind of stress for yourself?” Indeed. Why would I? Our tribe of friends and loved ones want the best for us and don’t want to see us in pain, but sometimes the painful path is the one we have to take in order to be fully free. And when you’re desperate for answers or healing, you’ll do just about anything to get it. I wanted to have a baby and I knew on some intuitive level that I had to take this path and see my father. At this point, my father was in his late seventies, living in a rehabilitative group home of sorts. I don’t know if it was for financial reasons, medical, or both. He suffered from complications of type 2 diabetes, emphysema, and poverty. Seeing him in this state was surreal. I didn’t see him as the seventy-eight-year-old wheel-chaired man his body was clearly exhibiting. I saw him as the throwaway boy during the Great Depression of the 1930s. When my father was nine, his father died, and his mother abandoned him to a boys’ orphanage because she couldn’t afford to care for him and his older sister. It was during this time in the boys’ home that he was sexually and physically abused. He ran away at sixteen and joined the navy. He didn’t recognize me at first. I’m not sure he would’ve recognized me at all had my mother not been with me on this visit. He recognized her immediately. Once he realized who I was, he was elated to see us both. At the time, I wondered why I was there. He was lost in his abandoned childhood, spewing resentment for his mother. He was lost in the unanswered questions around my brother’s severe autism and why the government didn’t help us. “The government owes us,” he’d say. He said that a lot during my childhood. Clearly, he was still lost in his victim state of mind. I felt sorry for him. He was stuck in his past. I was not stuck in mine. That was an aha moment for me. I had done so much work to resolve and neutralize the effects of his abuse on my life—years of therapy and years of boundaries. All good, all very much worth the emotional and mental agony. After about twenty minutes, Mom and I got up to leave. With his walker, he walked us to the door. Mom gave him a hug. I did not. As I was unlocking my car door, he called out to me. With a very lucid, adultlike tone, he shouted, “Lisha, I’m sorry for everything!” And just like Han Solo said to Princess Leia, I replied with, “I know.” Facetious? Yes, it was. As much as that acknowledgment should’ve been a moment of instant forgiveness, it wasn’t. Because he had apologized before, quite halfheartedly. You can tell when someone is sincere in an apology or when it’s just the beginning of a slew of excuses for their bad behavior. His apologies always fell under the latter category. On the drive home, I still questioned why I made that visit. What was the point of all that? A few days later, I lay on Donna’s massage table. When I had told my female colleagues at work about my challenges with getting pregnant, they told me about this craniosacral therapist in town who “gets all the girls pregnant.” I didn’t hesitate and scheduled an appointment with Donna. When I walked into Donna’s home practice, I didn’t tell her my story of sexual abuse, the recent dream I had, or the visit I made to see my father. I simply told her I was having trouble getting pregnant. She didn’t ask for any more information. I got up onto her massage table and she started hovering her hands around my body without touching it at first. I understand now that she was using her senses to read my body’s energy, like a Reiki practitioner does. “Oh yeah, your left ovary seems blocked,” she said nonchalantly. She then placed her hands at my tail bone and at the base of my head and started to gently rock those areas. The theory behind craniosacral therapy is that the stresses and strains of life can cause tightening and distortion in the craniosacral system (membranes and cerebrospinal fluid that surround and protect the brain and spinal cord) and lead to restrictions. With gentle hand pressure and rocking, you can loosen this energy clog and, as a result, experience relief where there was pain. I had my doubts about this working for me, but I was willing to try anything. After some time on her table, tears started streaming down my face, strange and cathartic. With my eyes closed, I could see my reproductive organs and they were talking to me. “It’s ok now, Lisha, we are safe. You are safe. You can let go.” In that moment, I trusted what my body was telling me and knew nothing bad would happen upon releasing that old traumatic energy. It no longer served me. And so, I did. I let it go and let God. I cried the trauma out of me. I released it. Two weeks later, I was pregnant.