trau·ma/ˈtroumə,ˈtrômə/

noun

I am bringing this up because I am sure that we do not always recognize the challenges that we endure in this life as a trauma. More importantly, as a black woman, we just look at trauma and problems as a regular part of life, not even realizing that it is/was a big deal.

For example, I once went to a new gynecologist. She gave me what seemed like a thousand pages of paperwork to fill out; then, she reviewed each page with me during our consultation. On page two of the paperwork, I indicated that I had a vaginal birth and cesarean birth. On page three, when it asked if I ever had major surgery, I said no.

That’s the look my doctor had when I said I had never had major surgery. You see, I didn’t make the connection in my mind that the cesarean delivery was major surgery. That was pretty mind-blowing since, during a cesarean, they numbed everything from my waist down so they could cut through skin, fat, and muscle just to pull out some organs and dump them in a bowl. After they remove the organs, they pull out the baby, pack the organs back in (most likely incorrectly) and then staple your wounds back together.

I suddenly realized that not only had I experienced a severe surgery, but that the operation, the circumstances surrounding the surgery, and the aftermath of the surgery were all traumatic. This leads me to the thought about black women doing the back-breaking, risky, complicated tasks and brushing them off as if they are nothing. Taking on all the most traumatic of things and never looking at it or identifying it as trauma. Not realizing that since it is trauma and we have not addressed it properly or even identified it as such, then it manifests itself in other ways in our lives. We wonder why we are so tired, angry, unmotivated, disoriented, frustrated, and did I say tired?

The surgery was a symptom of the primary trauma, which was that I was hospitalized for two months on complete bed rest and delivered a baby at the 6-month mark, and she only lived for 22 days. That entire experience was a “deeply distressing and disturbing experience,” aka trauma. Since then, I had to do some significant work to address my trauma and heal from it; I’m still working.

I remember thinking that I just wanted to go back to the old me, the way I used to be before the trauma. One of the most challenging lessons I had to learn during my healing was that I could not go back to her. The Shawness that existed before the trauma had was transformed into a new iteration of me. My healing and coping are connected to getting to know and understand the latest version of me.

Here is the takeaway-trauma is transformative in a way that is akin to the way your hands can transform a lump of clay. The trauma will push you and pull you and stretch you and mold you until you become new.