Fireworks of Fear & Fury: Prying the Stories Out of Silence (part 2)

Part 1 was When Safety Isn’t the First Song.

The story goes, my father chased my mother with a knife, as she ran with me in her arms. The story goes he was a violent drunk.

The story goes he broke the ribs by punching a toddler off the twin bed. The story goes he cracked baby ribs to stop crying.

My sister says, “That was about me,” when she was a toddler. I say, “That was me in the crib,” I said. That’s what I heard.”

Is one story true? Both? Who does this story belong to?

We can’t be sure.

It seems our earliest cries were met with fear or fury, terror, or overwhelm.

Maybe our cries were like smoke detectors and fire alarms signaling danger, doom, or disaster to our father?

How would we grow to know that the primal needs of children are healthy, non-threatening, signs of life?

I didn’t know.

Babies used to terrify me. Crying babies used to make me anxious, as though they’d been possessed by something horrible and inconsolable.

It’s hard to say babies scared me. I don’t want that to be true.

I didn’t know why I had a reason to fear the rage raw human needs can provoke. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I understood words like a trigger. Before that, my fear of babies confirmed my worst fears about myself as damaged, flawed, and bad at being human.

Context can comfort, change, and even cure. Folks who worry that hard news will harm humans have the luxury of not needing hard truth.

For years, I had to pry the stories out of silence. For years, I had to ask why it always felt like there were things that people weren’t telling me beyond what I did remember.

I had images, nightmares, fragments, feelings, and sensations that terrified me and erupted like thunder and lightning beneath my skin, behind my eyelids, during sleep or waking.

I didn’t know they were clues or after effects rather than warnings or foreshadowing. I thought I was just bat-shit crazy. Symptoms seemed proof of my being damaged, not evidence of trauma.

I feared the unwell part of my father would come alive in me postpartum if I dared to parent. I feared that all humans with my DNA if too stressed, too vulnerable, too tired could turn me into the man with my last name. I feared whatever blood I shared with was a primal flaw, as if violence was a tripwire hidden without my body.

I had no idea that my father also had the legacy of pain, compounded by Vietnam.

How many of us are sent exploding through the night propelled by fireworks of fear and fury driving our bodies too fast, too far, and away from others?

How many of us are at the mercy of nervous systems unable to still, settle, and calibrate? How many broken bits of glass are cracked, shattered, cut apart from the whole before they even remember the connection that got severed or knew the glass that had been unbroken?