Letters to My Daughter: On Trauma and Your Fear of Immanent Death
The Accident
I remember when you were going into fifth grade. During that summer the Bellevue School District decided to “upgrade” the playground at Somerset Elementary. In place of a beloved and much-climbed jungle gym, there appeared a set of sparkling play equipment, surrounded by low-hanging chains on a bed of asphalt. We walked there often, as it was close to our house at the top of Somerset Hill. I remember being struck by the flawed design, and I said, “Someone is going to be injured here.”
That someone was you. In the fall of fifth grade, you went down the shiny new slide, whooshed through the chain, and sustained a major concussion. The nurse in the office sent you home. She did not call me to tell me what had happened, nor to ask if I wanted to pick you up, so you walked. Upon arriving you vomited blood. Your sister, our older daughter, was home from college on a break and could drive to the emergency room. In the car, more bloody vomit. I sat beside you in the back seat and held the barf bowl.
They kept you for a few hours, did CAT scans, and other tests. Gave you something by mouth for the vomiting. We brought you home with the usual instructions: watch her pupils. To say it was a bad night does not begin to capture the parental nightmare of watching one’s eleven-year-old daughter suffer severe concussion from an accident that was completely avoidable.
A note on this: I did follow up and get a settlement of court with the Bellevue School District. They made a “college fund” for you; it would mature when you turned eighteen. This was their way of avoiding a courtroom situation. I am sure my feelings about the pedestrian accident I sustained with your older brother in 1982 factored in here. I remember sitting in a restaurant over lunch with the attorney from the school district. I wish I could have done more, looking back. I have always had the wish to do more—to be recompensed for the “accidents” of life. And yet accidents happen as a citizen of the Earth. And as I write down what happened to you, a feeling of victimization rises to the surface and takes on a life of its own. It feels like primal rage.
It turns out you would need cosmetic surgery, as your nose had been pushed to the side by the impact of the fall. The details around that are fuzzy. Only that because you had already been the subject of major surgery when you were four, we wanted to avoid subjecting you to this. It was sketchy. Always is. Would this really help the situation? It’s coming back. For years after the injury, when you cried, the left side of your face turned red. Bright red. Crying happened often then.
To return to the rage. My anger at this incident only brings back a deep-seated fury at the myriad incidents of malfeasance I suffered at the hands of perhaps well-meaning specialists during your pregnancy, which was anything but normal.
The Electric Shock
There was the time when I was about three or four months pregnant with you, and due to a non-grounded outlet and the wet sponge in my hand, I became a conduit for electricity. I remember jumping backwards like a cartoon character, back arched, and then thinking, “I must be stressed out”. I lay down on the couch. It is truly shocking, forgive the pun, that I did not have any relationship to my own body at that point. There wasn’t room for me to have the thought, “Something very bad just happened and it was not due to anything I did”.
Almost immediately I assigned the feeling of electricity shooting through my body up to stress.
It was sometime later that your father found out about the ungrounded outlet. After a visit to the OB, during which you had an arrhythmic heartbeat, they sent me off for the ultrasound that would show your right kidney as a black spot—a problem to be investigated by first monthly and then bi-weekly and then, before you were born prematurely, weekly ultrasounds that felt extremely invasive. Depressed is an understatement for how I managed through the last few months of carrying you. In the third trimester you turned and became irretrievably breach. I got kicked a lot, in the bladder. My thoughts ran along the lines of, “How can a deformed baby be so active?”
I was told by one doctor on the phone, a few days before I had you via an emergency caesarean due to placenta abruptio, “Mrs. Skillman, why would you want to have a caesarean for a child that is already dead?” His name was Dr. Karp. An expert in birth defects of the unborn at Swedish Hospital in downtown Seattle. I call him Dr. Crap. He later became the author of murder mystery novels.
The Pandemic
During Covid, you practiced an incredible array of techniques to “stay safe,” which ultimately resulted in total cut off from the world. As a therapist Zooming with clients, your solely virtual contacts with clients gradually became untenable. Depression and anxiety came to the fore. You felt you would die at any moment. It was frightening to witness, and some family members were so worried about your mental health that an intervention was proposed by the sibling who happens to be your older sister.
Finally, towards the end of annus horribilis 2021, you and yours got Covid. It wasn’t pretty. But it was over. The fear disappeared and you turned back into the social butterfly we recognized. You became happy again. Our collective sigh of relief could almost be heard.
Factor V Leiden
Well, here we are, and you keep having early miscarriages. Is this due to Factor V Leiden? Or does it have to do with your body’s innate knowledge that to carry another baby will further debilitate what’s left of your abs. I came to visit the day after Luke was born. You not only needed a caesarean, you needed reconstructive surgery, as, due to the birth defect and subsequent surgery on your kidney and bladder, your abdominal muscles are not strong. In fact, while you were pregnant with Luke, it seemed as if you were going to have twins like your older sister. Your belly ballooned sideways and full frontal.
You want another child. There have now been ten—we can count these on both fingers of our hands—miscarriages. For the most part you keep these to yourself, but I learned of one earlier this summer, since we happened to be together. It seemed an idyll. Five-year old Luke was playing with his five-year old cousin Cedar in the yard. You looked pregnant. You were pregnant, glowing, and, even, showing. Then, just as before, a few days later blood began to flow, first a little brown, then large purple clots, then bright red, finally dingy gray.
As your mother, I blame myself. This isn’t rational, but you’re a mom too, and you understand that as nurturers, we also take on a lot of guilt. I wonder if, due to my own compromised body at the time I conceived you—I had no idea that being run over by that car in a pedestrian accident would have such life-long consequences, but that is another story—I wonder whether my almost-miscarriage of you was my body’s attempt to protect both of us from suffering.
The takeaway: for there is always a silver lining. You are miraculous for many reasons. After my own early miscarriage began, I went to see my OB. Another doctor was there in his place. He asked me, “Do you want to finish this off now, or wait until tomorrow to see if there is any baby left?” I chose to wait. And you were there. And here you are. Let’s measure your fear of death against the odds of your survival.
Author’s Biography
Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. She has received awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Visit www.judithskillman.com
