Reentry: Being Touched Again

The walls you’ve built are strong. They are wide, insurmountable. You have built them around you for so long. They are there for reasons. Reasons you remember.

Six years ago, they left. You sat in an empty house, your children gone. You didn’t know when you would see them again, if he would hold up his end of the bargain. A bargain you have only told part of the story to some people. You remember that summer. The paper he held out to you, written by his lawyer, banning you from the children and the house and everything you had sacrificed for years to build. You had no money for a lawyer to fight this, no one to turn to for help. You pleaded to him to stop. He said he would, under certain conditions. You never told anyone those conditions. Until now. For those summer months, what you endured. You had lost your desire for him, the divorce was going to happen. This you both knew. He threatened to take the children, had the lawyer to do so, would use your mental illness to argue you were in no state to see them ever again. But. If you did this, he would tear up the paper, let you see them on weekends. He would bring them back. If.

If you let him do to you whatever he wanted. He would take you whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. Do whatever he wanted to you all summer long, until he left. You didn’t want to, but you wanted your children more. You agreed. You let him take you in the kitchen, in the basement, in the bedroom. He took you from behind, on the countertops, on the table in the basement where you used to do your crafts. He took you forcefully, hard, like he was punishing you for who you were. What you had done to the family, broken it apart, as if it was all your fault. You learned to go somewhere else in your mind when he did this, learned to pretend it wasn’t happening. He took you because he still wanted you but you didn’t want him. He took you and you let him because this was your punishment, your bargain. You trusted that through all this someday you would see the kids again after he took them away from you.

It ruined you. It destroyed who you were and who you trusted and who you thought you were. You stopped caring about who you became. Your mental illness turned from unruly to unrecognizable. It went from a mixed bipolar episode to a psychotic break that left you grasping for reality only to have it fly from your fingertips and you were screaming inside for a semblance of ground to land on. You no longer grasped a daily ritual, had days you didn’t sleep, days you collapsed and couldn’t function, days you slept in catatonia and couldn’t explain anything. Yet you held on.

The only thing that kept you holding on was that you did see your kids. You saw them fleetingly, on weekends, then every time they left it was a reminder of what you paid to see them in the first place. You learned to build a wall. A wall away from the reminder of what you had paid to have a life with them in it at all. You learned to deny to yourself what you went through. You denied it to be able to go on. You built your wall. You went on.

Then you met someone, someone during this manic episode you developed while building this wall. He seemed too good to be true. He accepted you even with your brokenness. He accepted your incompleteness and molded it into something that was acceptable to him. So you moved in with him. You ignored that he dumped all your things onto the floor gleefully when you moved in because he had never had things to respect. You ignored the red flags because there was someone who wanted to touch you when you felt untouchable. But when you had moved in together, he changed. He was no longer too good to be true. And for him to touch you, you had to pay. If you wanted him to sit next to you and rub your shoulders, you had to pay him in sexual favors. He had an image of not a partner, but an obedient servant. He showed one face to the world, another to you behind closed doors. He would block the way while yelling at you, keeping you blocked in bedrooms, saying you needed to hear what he was yelling because you were crazy and psycho and bad. You had to scratch your way free from him just to get out. Just for tender touches, you had to pay. He threatened to kill you. You were expected to perform for him and obey him and get into bed with him when he demanded and you learned to dissociate again when he demanded you put his limp thing in your mouth to make it hard and even when it didn’t work he blamed you for it as if you had that much power. But you had no power. You were stuck again.

You met with your parents one spring day in a small town café secretly to devise a plan. You had a lawyer this time. You served him with a protection order and divorce papers and even when he tried to fight the protection order and lied to the judge during the hearing the judge supported you and upheld the protection order. You built up more walls when he blazed through the protection order and followed you in your neighborhood during your walks. You kept those walls around you when the protection order was renewed for another year without a question from the judge and he kept trying to contact you and you had to talk to the police some more.

During COVID, you built up more walls. You were alone, and the social distancing prevented you from being touched. No one could hug. Your college-bound daughter was at your parents, but you couldn’t travel to see them, there being a no contact order out in your state. You talked, but didn’t touch. Your son came to see you on weekends. You hugged him tentatively, but then he sat on the other couch, as you watched television together. At your old job, you were out in the field alone, visiting clients at the required distance to tell them about their fields. At your new job, your office became like a womb, with the others working from home, and you interacting only with the person training you with masks on from a distance, talking to others on the phone as through the umbilical cord of your womb. You only went to stores when you needed, and didn’t touch anyone. Your meetings were cancelled. Your walls protecting you, brick by brick, were built up stronger.

It has been years since you were touched tenderly. Your kids hug you. Now you can walk in your neighborhood and go to your meetings. Now you have friends over to your house and talk to people and your walls are safe and there is someone maybe who accepts you. But there are walls. There is exhaustion when you think of these things and remember. But there is hope.

Your walls are strong. They are thick and insurmountable. But not so much so. You can let people through. You can learn to trust again. When friends at your meetings want hugs you say yes, hug me. You are learning to be touched again.

There is someone you are learning to trust, who you have known for years and you are learning to talk to and learning to let into your traumatized past and your broken self and your mangled soul. Little by little, you are being touched again. It is good. It is scary, but it is good. Maybe the next time, you will have the lights dim. They will walk in, not understand, but you will explain. You are learning to tear down walls. And in the dim light, when you can still barely see their face, the walls won’t seem so insurmountable. You can let yourself be touched. Just a little bit more.

8–4–21

Tansy Julie Soaring Eagle Paschold