If I Can Just Make it Home by Bobbi Parish (@BobbiLParish)

Almost twenty years ago, I was sitting with a client as she described her hopes and wishes for how she wanted to raise her children. She was a survivor. Like many adults who were abused when they were a child, she was uncertain about her ability to be a good parent. Her greatest fear was becoming just like her abusive mother. Pregnant with her third baby, she already had two toddlers. Her anxiety was escalating as her delivery date grew closer. She wasn’t sure she should have had her first two children, but now adding a third felt like she was dooming herself to failure and her children to an abusive nightmare.

I asked her to tell me about her greatest hope for what she could provide for her children. If a genie fell from the sky and offered to grant her one wish, I said, what would her mama heart ask for? She already knew. It was something she’d held inside herself since her own childhood. “When my children are out in the world, at school or someplace else away from home, and something hard happens to them I want them to be able to tell themselves ‘If I can just make it home, everything will be okay’”.

My reaction to her statement was visceral, like a body blow. The air left my lungs and tears filled my eyes. As a survivor myself I was sometimes triggered by what my clients discussed in our sessions. But I’d been doing this therapy thing for a while and those instances were becoming rare. This, though, took me by surprise and stole my words.

I looked at my client. My tears told her that I understood to the depths of my heart what that meant for her. Neither of us grew up feeling like our homes were a safe place. There was no “If I can just make it home everything will be okay”. Ours was an “If I can just make it out of this home, everything will be okay”. [share ]We had no safe harbor. Our safe place was inside of our head[/share], where we retreated when the world got threatening. This was, sadly, very often.

My client and I just sat together for a few moments, sharing tears of pain over what we did not have and tears of hope for what we wanted so fiercely to create for our children. I assured her that [share ]I saw in her the capacity to create that safe haven for her kids[/share], all three of them. And I hoped that I too would have what it took to make my home a sanctuary for the children I would someday have.

Fast forward almost two decades to today, when I received a message from another survivor. Her daughter was experiencing a severe episode of depression and had expressed suicidal thoughts last night. Would I help her, she asked, to determine how serious the situation was? I walked her through the stages of lethality of suicidal ideation. She said she’d already set up both a therapy and a doctor’s appointment for later today. Her husband called into work and both of them were with their daughter. They kept her home from school so she could be in the safety of her own home, with her mom and dad beside her.

I told my client she had done everything I would. Her pain over her daughter’s deep depression was palpable. Both of us had been in that dark place, as children and adults. Our parents had so little care for our state of mind.

There was no one to protect us when we feared that even retreating inside our heads would not give us enough of a reprieve from our daily pain.

But now, as moms, each of us would trade a decade in that dark space to save our child from spending even one day there.

When I finished the conversation my mind dumped the memory of my appointment with my pregnant client years ago. This time, the tears came without the body blow. They came because I knew I had realized our shared dream. My son, now a teenager, knew the safety of a loving home with a parent who adored him and would do anything to keep him from harm – just as the woman I had been speaking to had done with her daughter.

The tears also came because I now know for certain, twenty years later, that we survivors can absolutely crush the fear of becoming like our abuser. But even more so, we can gift our children what was never given to us: the certain knowing that if they just make it home, everything will be okay.

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