Cracks and all

What Happens When Love Finds You After Trauma?

Let’s talk about love.

If you’re traumatized like me, your experience with love can feel less like a mixed bag and more like a bag of shit.

Seriously. What good experience am I supposed to fall back on?

For most of my life, I idolized my parents’ marriage because I had been taught that this was what a happy marriage looked like.

My parents rarely fought.

Of course, I eventually realized that was partly because my mother’s voice carried very little weight.

In public, we were praised for being such well-behaved children. We were told we were “rich with love.” My parents were passionately Protestant, had five kids, and from the outside we looked like a big, happy family.

And yet I couldn’t remember most of my childhood.

Years of therapy and healing eventually uncovered the sexual abuse I had locked away.

So…yeah.

Not exactly the example of love I want to recreate for my son.

My romantic relationships weren’t much better.

Looking back, they tended to reflect the subconscious wounds I hadn’t processed yet.

In my twenties and early thirties, I had lots of friends. I was always out. I was fun—but responsible fun.

I came to the parties, but I was usually the person making sure nobody overdosed, drove drunk, or completely lost control.

I rarely lost control myself.

Then my first fiancé cheated on me.

That wrecked me.

I had thought I escaped the role I played in my family, and when the relationship fell apart, I went home with my tail between my legs as if I had failed.

I didn’t date for years after that.

I shut that part of myself off.

I focused on work, friends, and having fun.

I didn’t heal.

I hid.

Then came the doozy.

The most intense and abusive relationship of my life.

I lost so much in that relationship.

Most of all, I lost my sense of self.

But she was still in there somewhere.

Because when I found out I was pregnant, something in me woke up.

This child was not going to grow up in that environment.

There is a lot more trauma between those scenes, but you get the idea.

Love had been rough.

And then I met my son.

I loved him while he was still inside me, but nothing prepared me for the moment they put him on my chest.

He lifted his tiny newborn head and looked at me.

And there he was.

My baby.

I knew instantly that I would give my life for this child without hesitation.

It was just the two of us.

That first night, I nearly bled out in my sleep.

I woke up to a blood clot the size of a baseball.

I was weak. My son wouldn’t nurse because of a tongue tie. I desperately needed help.

But no one really advocated for me.

My “helpful” mother seemed more concerned with herself than with what was happening to me, while making sure the extended family heard how well everyone was doing.

That’s love, right?

By the time my son was six months old, we were living alone in an empty house scheduled for foreclosure.

I found a job, but the commute was brutal.

Two hours each way in traffic.

My infant son and I spent almost four hours a day together in the car just so I could work.

Then we would get home, eat, bathe, sleep, and do it all again the next morning.

His dad was largely absent and fought with me far more than he helped me.

He remarried. Our son was encouraged to call his stepmother “Mama” when he was only two or three.

They had met while we were still married.

I was still alone.

So…that’s love, right?

Except somewhere along the way, my son started teaching me what unconditional love actually was.

Unconditional love is being allowed to be human.

It is being allowed to make mistakes without believing those mistakes make you a bad person.

It is genuinely enjoying one another—rain or shine.

It is acknowledging your faults without fear of retaliation.

It is respecting boundaries.

It is keeping interactions healthy.

And when we fail at that, because we are human, it is repairing instead of destroying.

I was angry for a long time.

And my anger was never a tiny little flame.

It was a five-alarm inferno.

After the abuse I had experienced, the things I had seen, and the ways I had been treated and touched by men, I spent a while on a rampage.

Sometimes I didn’t even want to be around myself.

But my son did.

God, did that child melt my heart.

I worked very hard not to direct my anger toward him.

I put him in therapy when he was three, just in case.

Sometimes I would set him up with an activity, go into my bedroom, and quietly cry where I thought he couldn’t hear me.

He would come looking for me anyway.

He would wrap his little arms around me and say,

“It’s okay, Mommy.”

The same words I had said to him whenever he got hurt.

And slowly, over years of journaling, meditation, reading, therapy, parenting, failing, apologizing, trying again, and healing…

my life changed.

I don’t live in fear anymore.

I don’t have a large family anymore either.

They only really accepted me when I filled the role they assigned me, and eventually I stopped auditioning for it.

I don’t get angry very often now.

After eight years apart, my son now has a weekly relationship with his father.

And I will admit something that took a lot of healing for me to say:

His dad has done work.

He is healing.

And given our personal history, I believe he has done enough work to deserve the opportunity to build a relationship with his son.

The decisions I made under tremendous duress are part of why we are here now.

I could have stayed angry.

I could have made sure my son never knew his father.

I could have spent the rest of my life punishing his dad for what he did to me.

That probably would have been easier—for me.

I could have remarried immediately, like what felt like every person in the South suggested I should.

Because God forbid a woman raise a child alone.

But I did.

All the diapers.

The colds.

The tantrums.

The sleepless nights.

Court.

COVID.

Therapy.

Debt collectors.

Medical bills.

Living expenses that somehow seem to increase exponentially every year.

I did it alone.

And because of that, I became incredibly efficient.

I don’t need someone.

Life taught me how to survive without one.

Which, unfortunately, can make dating interesting.

An independent woman who knows how to run a household, manage money, solve problems, raise a child, rebuild her life, and cook a decent meal can apparently be intimidating.

And some men do not respond well to feeling intimidated.

They want to take you down a peg or two.

And, respectfully…

MF, my own mother already made sure I never developed an oversized ego.

I don’t need that service from anyone else.

So eventually, I gave up on dating.

The pool seemed rather shallow anyway.

And then…

What happens when love finds you?

Not the kind you hunted for.

Not the kind you thought you needed.

Not the kind you built your life around waiting for.

What happens when it just smacks you out of nowhere and makes you think,

Oh.

You’re different.

Cue the self-destruction.

Suddenly every cobweb you didn’t know was still there becomes visible.

Every attachment wound.

Every fear.

Every old belief.

Every crack you thought you had repaired.

And the truly absurd part?

You haven’t even been on a real date.

That is when love after trauma gets interesting.

I realized something recently, and the best way I can explain it is with a metaphor.

Imagine you built a house.

You gathered all the materials yourself.

You struggled to put everything together.

Sometimes you didn’t know what you were doing.

You learned as you went.

You made mistakes.

You repaired things.

And somehow, after all of that work, you stood back one day and realized:

Holy shit.

I built something beautiful.

It isn’t perfect.

But it is yours.

It is safe.

It is home.

And you are proud of it.

Then one day, someone knocks on the door.

And something about them feels familiar.

Not familiar in the dangerous way.

Familiar in the strange way that makes you think:

You belong here.

Except you weren’t expecting company.

You never built a spare room.

So you say,

“Okay…hold on a minute.”

And suddenly you start looking around your beautiful house differently.

You notice cracks you never cared about before.

That wall needs paint.

That floor isn’t level.

There’s a weird stain over there.

You begin seeing every flaw you never noticed while you were living perfectly happily alone.

Because now somebody might see them.

And this person seems perfect in your eyes.

Meanwhile, they are standing outside your door having the exact same existential crisis.

They run home, look around their own house, and suddenly notice every crack there too.

So now both of you are renovating.

Fixing.

Analyzing.

Pulling things apart.

Trying to become somehow worthy of entering the other person’s home.

And eventually, somewhere between fixing things, you stop.

You sit down.

And you think:

What the hell am I doing?

I liked this house before they showed up.

I worked incredibly hard to build this life.

And given my experience with love, what are the odds this actually turns out differently?

One percent?

Maybe less?

So you slow down.

You stop renovating for a while.

You go back to your life.

You do the things that used to make you perfectly happy.

Except something is different now.

It doesn’t hit quite the same.

Because there is this glaring little diamond stuck inside one of the cracks in your wall.

Every time the light hits it, it sparkles.

It seems incredibly obvious.

And yet you can’t quite reach it.

So instead of trying to tear the entire wall down, you become curious.

You look at the crack differently.

Maybe there is something valuable inside it.

Maybe the crack doesn’t need to disappear.

Maybe it gives the house character.

Maybe it is part of the story of how this place was built.

Maybe perfection was never the goal.

So you leave it.

Then one day…

there is another knock at the door.

And this time, you let them in.

They walk through your house.

They notice the cracks.

Of course they do.

But instead of criticizing them…

they like them.

They ask about them.

They run their fingers along the places you once wanted desperately to hide.

And something funny happens.

You realize you like their cracks too.

Their quirks.

Their repairs.

The weird floorboard they never fixed.

The wall they painted three times and still don’t quite like.

The places where life happened.

And suddenly your house doesn’t feel smaller because another person entered it.

It feels bigger.

Then one day you notice something that wasn’t there before.

A door.

You open it.

And on the other side is their house.

And maybe that is what healthy love actually is.

Not someone rescuing you from the house you built.

Not someone demolishing it.

Not abandoning your home and moving entirely into theirs.

Maybe love is discovering that two complete homes can somehow become connected.

Two people.

Two histories.

Two imperfect lives.

Two sets of cracks.

And somehow God looks at all of it and says,

“Actually…

these fit.”

Cracks and all.