Home Is Where Trauma Is
Bust of an African woman rendered in black marble, white marble, and jasper. Perhaps made in Italy, in the 17th or 18th centuries. The Wallace Collection. Manchester Square, London, United Kingdom. Photo by Levi Clancy on Unsplash.
Home is not always where the heart is. In fact, being quarantined at home can bring up traumatic experiences and memories. Maryline Dossou (she/her) shares her journey on navigating childhood trauma, surviving breast cancer, and taking care of her mental health during a global pandemic.
“While for some, being quarantined with family with the ability to work from home is a dream come true. For others, it is triggering in many different ways.”
In January, I started seeing a therapist again for the first time in ten years. After much convincing from friends, family and medical professionals, I came across an organization who provided young cancer survivors with free therapy. After deciding I liked her straight-shooting approach to me, I began looking forward to trekking to her Columbus Square office in seek of her counsel in regards to this week’s catastrophe. By April, I was spending Friday afternoons locked up in the bedroom of my mother’s house in Maryland, speaking in somewhat hushed tones so that my mother couldn’t hear me talking about all the ways in which she and my father had fucked me up.
Our town in Maryland is an unremarkable, medium-sized suburban one with a remarkable amount of deer, many of them strewn about our roads. Not a cute small town with a Main Street populated with vintage-looking ice cream parlors and niche shops. There are no mountains in the distance. No interesting architecture or landscape. No excitement of a big city. It’s a far drive if you’re looking to have any fun. You can drive 45 minutes to D.C. or an hour to Baltimore. Or you can sit glibly in a local bar among a sea of patrons who could double as Sons of Anarchy extras before dragging your sorry ass to TGIFriday’s and calling it a night.
Being back here after living my dream life in Manhattan has taken every bit of therapy talk time I can get to remain sane. And I know I’m not alone. While for some, being quarantined with family with the ability to work from home is a dream come true. For others, it is triggering in many different ways.
“We are all collectively experiencing the same event, a global pandemic. But somehow none of us is having the same experience. We are each quarantined with our own anxieties, fears, hopes, demons, bliss, skeletons, our very own unique realities.”
My mother has turned my room into an essential storage unit, so I have usurped the master bedroom for my time here in quarantine. From the tall windows in the master bedroom of our two-story house I can see a cluster of plush, green backyards separated only by a maze of jagged wooden fences where birds and squirrels run amok. Each backyard has its own vibe; some have decks, some do not. Some have tool sheds, some have lustrous gardens, some have aboveground pools where stray flower buds float aimlessly in the hose water. Some are brimming with life: dogs running free, children jumping on trampolines, the husband and wife next door toasting to their empty nest with cocktails, aching silently for their grown children. Others are quiet, empty, cold, eerie.
What goes on inside, I wonder? Are they happy? Are they working from home? Have they been furloughed? Laid off? Are they sick with worry and anxiety or have they wrapped their brains around a conspiracy theory? Do they live alone? Is there someone to check in on them in case anything should happen? Are they trapped with an abuser? Have they lost someone recently? How can anyone know what anyone else is going through during this time? We are all collectively experiencing the same event, a global pandemic. But somehow none of us is having the same experience. We are each quarantined with our own anxieties, fears, hopes, demons, bliss, skeletons, our very own unique realities. A million little stories taking place just heartbeats away from one another. Separated only by jagged wooden fences.
“I believed that the truly strong could keep everything bottled inside, could excel in life while facing adversity without medication or therapists or any additional hand-holding.”
With my blunt positioned between my two fingers, I bring it up to my lips, flick my neon green lighter on and inhale. I lean out the window and blow smoke through the screen, watching the vapor get carried away by the wind. I sit on a chair, a genius idea to bring the swivel chair from my college apartment (the contents of which are still stored in my mother’s basement/garage) up to the room after a month of killing my knees by squatting in front of the window. I’m annoyed because, in my Harlem apartment, I can smoke freely in my bedroom. I don’t have to hide or sugarcoat who I am.
But for the time being, I must maintain my virginal image around my mother. I must nod and smile when she asks me if anything is wrong, if I’m okay. I must be a vibrant version of myself that I have never been, dancing around the house, blowing her air kisses. Our relationship has come too far and all I worry about is her health and safety. Every day, often seven days a week, my mother dresses in her scrubs, armors herself in PPE and heads to a long shift as a nurse in an assisted living facility. If she’s more than 15 minutes late coming home, I call her. I have been back in her house for three months now, the longest I’ve spent here since I would come back from college for summers a decade ago. And so much has changed.
Ten years ago, I boarded a sweltering Chinatown bus in Philadelphia carrying a suitcase half my size, readying myself mentally to be in Maryland for another summer after my sophomore year of college. Going home was hard during college because those were the years I really came into myself. I experienced freedom and true independence for the first time in my life and there was no going back for me.
My mother and I were not close growing up because we were never expected to be. Our Togolese culture dictates that love is a romantic emotion that exists between a man and a woman who want to marry and procreate together. Filial love is a strange concept. The idea of running into your parents’ arms, jumping up and down on their lap and telling them you love them seems Hollywood. We aren’t really taught to love our parents as much as respect and obey them. Parents were the wardens of the household. They were stoic and demanding, concerned with little more than order and efficiency. My parents never told me they loved me until well into my adulthood.
I spent my teen years in a depression that seemed to grow like a cancer inside me. Fueled by a dangerous cocktail of a penchant towards wild behavior, the various men who abused me and the numbing loneliness of being a weird, immigrant, queer Black girl with cliché big city dreams in a small, mostly-white suburban town. Cue therapy.
“If anyone understands the terror of being left with your own thoughts and trauma, it’s me.”
In many ways, I was already Americanized. But certain parts of me were (and still are) learning to analyze which parts of my African culture I held dear and which are toxic and antiquated. I was still behind on therapy then. I felt the same way about it that my parents did: it was for weak people. I believed that the truly strong could keep everything bottled inside, could excel in life while facing adversity without medication or therapists or any additional hand-holding. But as I continued to “face” my problems by slicing myself up like a pineapple, I got sloppy and got caught by a friend. That friend threatened to tell my mother unless I sought therapy, and so I did, however initially resistant.
Maryline Dossou pictured in her mother’s backyard, shortly before being yelled at to wash the dishes. Photo courtesy of Maryline Dossou.
During a fight that summer at home, I blurted out to my mom that she was the reason I was in therapy. As if there was a record scratch, she froze immediately. I thought I had gone too far, accusing her of being an awful parent, piercing her ego. Instead, she was beside herself that I was in therapy. If anyone ever found out, how embarrassing for the family! You don’t want to disappoint your family, do you? I didn’t. And so, with my mother’s urging, I began to grow distaste for my therapy sessions and stopped going altogether. I had unpacked enough childhood trauma with my girl Denise that I could move forward anyway, I convinced myself.
Over the years, I have distanced myself from my past tremendously. I have shed the skin of the person I was then and grown into one that feels more authentic. I have walked this world alone and I have done so with my head held high. I have traversed various terrain, driven this country from coast to coast, hiked up hundreds of steps to kneel in prayer with elders at the Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong, kissed strangers in Amsterdam, drank beer brewed by monks at a monastery in Prague, danced on stage at parties on Lake Como, danced in the rain at a concert in Barcelona (while undergoing cancer treatment), wandered the streets of Brussels drunk at 2 am in search of food, picnicked in cemeteries in Paris after meandering about the arrondissements hungover, ridden ATVS all around the island of Aruba in the hottest sun I’ve ever felt, gotten to meet beautiful Black activists in Salvador, the Blackest city in Brazil, napped in parks in Dublin, partied in Berlin until 5 am, and been chased in a tuk-tuk in Thailand by a group of schoolchildren who hilariously mistook me for Nicki Minaj. And I gave all those experiences to myself.
But I think of those memories, and how vast the world is, and how much of it I’d been able to see with my own eyes without so much as a second thought to any dangers lurking outside my front door. And my mother’s bedroom all of a sudden feels so small to me, I’m afraid I will suffocate. If anyone understands the terror of being left with your own thoughts and trauma, it’s me.
Being back in my mother’s house undid the past twelve years in an instant. I was suddenly unpacking my childhood all over again for another white lady I did not know. But then I got the inspiration to turn all those traumatic stories into a memoir. The memoir I had been planning to write since I was diagnosed with cancer. I began seeing so many links between my childhood and the last year and a half of my life since my diagnosis. This, I realized, was perhaps my purpose during this time.
“There is so much to be thankful for and also so much to grieve right now. And both can be true simultaneously. ”
My writing has always been distant from myself. I became a journalist to avoid talking about myself. I come from an intensely private family, and I find other people and their stories much more interesting anyhow. Never did I think I would ever write any sort of memoir. Even with the encouragement of fellow writers and mentors, I never thought I could dig deep enough to confront my fear of violating my own privacy.
But the more I talked about my life to a complete stranger, in more detail than I have in ten years, I realized how many stories I have kept bottled inside. How trauma afflicts us all and everything I have learned about my trauma, be it from childhood abuse or cancer. A pandemic is traumatic. Half of a nation being out of work is traumatic. Seeing Black bodies die through a phone screen is traumatic. Having war waged on us by our own government is traumatic. Being Black while having to live through all of these things at the same time is enough to send the most mentally sound sprinting to a therapist.
I’m not saying that the universe unleashed COVID-19 upon humanity so that you could spend more time with your mother or write the next great American novel or end world hunger. These are not joyous times. The magnitude of this will change life as we’ve come to know it for a long time to come. What I am saying is that you can choose to give meaning to something during this time. Whether it is marching in the streets for civil rights or planning the next step in your life. Right now is about survival. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in a matter of months. I lost a family member to COVID. Bodies have been piled and dumped like rubble. Unmarked graves punctuate every corner of the world. Rituals of death that have endured for hundreds of years have gone undone. Our dead cannot even be properly mourned. If you merely survive this pandemic, you have done more than enough. If you live to see another dusk, to dance at a concert again with a buzzing crowd, to hop on an airplane and get lost in terra incognita, to meet your newborn niece or nephew and run your fingers through their hair, to sit around a table at a restaurant with your best mates, tipsy and jovial, then you have done enough.
There is so much to be thankful for and also so much to grieve right now. And both can be true simultaneously.
Whatever your situation during this time, I hope you are able to find some pocket of joy somewhere, no matter how small. And I hope it gets you through to the other side, where we are (safely) back into the world, enjoying all of the things that bring us respite by bringing us together. Until then, do whatever you can to stay sane and please, despite any re-openings, stay inside.
Maryline Dossou (she/her) is a writer and editor based in Harlem. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from Temple University and an M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU. She is currently turning her journey of battling breast cancer in her twenties into a memoir, and using that experience to galvanize advocacy for affordable healthcare as well as a cure. In her spare time, you can find her minding her business, cheering for everybody Black and dabbling in photography. Follow her on Instagram @marylineisnotdead and Twitter @macabremaryline.