“Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having had a different past.”
Edith Eger
In a few weeks, my boys will turn twenty-one.
What a wonderful milestone.
Birthdays have a curious way of inviting us to look backwards before they allow us to look fully forwards. At the same time as approaching this milestone, I’ve been exploring what feels like one final layer of my complex PTSD story with my therapist. Somehow, the two seem to have met in the middle.
I’ve found myself looking through old photographs, some of which I’m sharing with you here.
I see ventilators and incubators. Monitors and hospital rooms. I see frightened new parents trying to make sense of events that had unfolded so quickly.
But as I’ve sat with these photographs, something has quietly shifted.
I’ve begun to notice something else.
Hands.
Holding.
Presence.
Connection.
The quiet ministry of people who simply refused to let go.
These photographs tell two stories about the very same events.
One is a story of trauma.
The other is a story of love.
Looking back over those early weeks and months, I’ve realised there are large parts that I simply don’t remember.
My boys arrived through an emergency birth that required resuscitation. Isaac spent time in special care, and just three weeks later Ethan developed life-threatening sepsis. We spent weeks in hospital, frightened and exhausted, living very much in survival mode.
As I’ve reflected on those photographs and explored this season in therapy, I’ve decided to write to the hospital to request our medical records from that time.
Not because I’m stuck.
Quite the opposite.
I’m doing better than I have for a long time.
I’m writing because I’d like to understand my own story a little more fully.
The past twenty-one years have been rich.
I’m incredibly proud of the two healthy young men my tiny babies have become.
Life hasn’t been easy. There have been challenges along the way. But there has also been laughter, work, love, creativity and so much healing.
Perhaps this next stage of healing isn’t about trying harder.
Perhaps it’s about understanding more deeply.
Perhaps understanding is one more way of making peace with the story I’ve already lived.
Recently I’ve found myself returning to Edith Eger’s wonderful book The Choice. One sentence in particular stopped me in my tracks.
“Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having had a different past.”
I’ve been carrying that sentence around with me for days.
Because as I think back to those traumatic weeks, I notice old emotions surfacing.
Anger towards the obstetrician whose decisions made an already difficult birth even more dangerous.
Frustration that Ethan’s illness wasn’t recognised as quickly as it should have been.
Sadness for that frightened young family we once were.
And yet, perhaps forgiveness begins when I stop hoping that history could somehow have unfolded differently.
It didn’t.
That is the story we lived.
Trauma has a habit of whispering, “If only...”
If only different decisions had been made.
If only someone had recognised the danger sooner.
If only I’d seen the warning signs before my friend’s suicide.
Our minds keep searching for a version of history that doesn’t exist.
Perhaps you have your own “if only” story.
I’ve also been wondering whether trauma doesn’t simply leave us with painful memories.
Sometimes it leaves us with bodies that remain on constant alert.
Always scanning.
Always preparing.
Always expecting the next emergency.
Hypervigilance probably protected me once.
It helped me survive.
But twenty-one years later, I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s still trying to protect me from dangers that have long since passed.
And perhaps that’s why acceptance has become such an important word for me.
Not passive acceptance.
Not approval.
Not pretending it didn’t matter.
Not forgetting.
Acceptance simply says:
This happened.
It mattered.
I wish it hadn’t.
But it cannot now be different.
Only then can I stop arguing with reality.
I’m beginning to think that giving up hope for a different past makes room for hope for a better future.
My hope now isn’t that history will somehow change.
My hope is for understanding.
For peace.
For freedom.
For healing.
For a nervous system that slowly learns it no longer has to live on constant alert.
So, as I write to the hospital to ask for those medical records, I’m not trying to relive those weeks.
I’m not collecting evidence.
I’m not reopening wounds.
I’m simply reading the missing pages because, perhaps, I’m finally strong enough to read them.
And maybe understanding them a little more fully will help my heart and body catch up with something my head already knows.
The emergency is over.
Perhaps that’s what healing has been trying to teach me all along.
Now, when I look at those photographs, I still see trauma.
I still see tiny babies, hospital equipment and frightened parents.
But I also see something I couldn’t see so clearly before.
I see love sitting quietly beside every incubator.
I see hands that never let go.
I see people who kept turning up, one day at a time, carrying us when we couldn’t carry ourselves.
Perhaps that’s been the truest story all along.
The trauma was real.
But so was the love.
And maybe, twenty-one years later, I’m finally ready to carry both stories together.
With a little less fear.
And a little more peace.
I wonder what your “if only...” story might be.
Is there an impossible hope you’ve been carrying—one that quietly asks yesterday to be different?
Perhaps, gently and in your own time, there is freedom to lay that hope down.
Not because what happened didn’t matter.
Not because it wasn’t deeply painful.
But because perhaps your heart, too, deserves to hear the words mine is slowly learning to believe:
The emergency is over.
❤️