the body keeps the score, but the spirit remembers the good

on trauma memories + healing

For most of my adult life, anything bad that ever happened to me happened in March or May. For five straight years, something bad happened every March or May. A life altering church trauma, witnessing a violent crime with my children, a miscarriage, hemorrhage, and emergency d+c, a crisis twin pregnancy, hospitalization, emergency c-section and premature delivery at 29 weeks, and two months in the NICU. March. May. March. May.

The body keeps the score and a brain wired for pattern recognition starts bracing for impact every time the calendar turns.

Our most recent trauma was my crisis twin pregnancy. (I wrote the full story in my book, Even if He Doesn’t) Four years ago, on March 3, our lives were thrown into chaos and every year since, my body has reminded me of it.

Your body remembers pain, confusion, fear, and disorientation and when trauma anniversaries come up, you’ll sometimes feel all of those things, even though you’re not actively thinking about it. Your body just, remembers.

But this year, for the first time in the four years since our twins were born, my body remembered something else.

March 3rd came and went. But March 5th, today, I woke up and remembered that two days after our fatal diagnosis, I drove to Columbia University with my mom, my sister, and two of my sisters in law, and got a second opinion. It took all day to even get inside the door. It was potentially a life or death appointment. I might have needed to get an emergency surgery. We were doing everything we could to save both of my daughters’ lives, and insurance was holding it up. We couldn’t get approval fast enough. We couldn’t get the hospital and the insurance company to talk to each other. It was a mess. It was stressful. And because of the trauma that followed, my mind sort of just suppressed the joy of what happened that day.

It’s not that I forgot. I’ve thought about it many times over the years and talked about it often. It’s just that pain and fear are two of the most powerful things in the human experience and they can really take over your life. They protect us, yes, but they also cause a lot of harm. They control us, contort our realities, change our personalities, threaten our lives, ruin our relationships, give us amnesia. It happens without our consent - completely outside of our control. It’s not a spiritual failing or personal choice, it’s just a human thing that happens to all of us in crisis.

Trauma is disorientating.
Healing can be too.

Our bodies keep the score of the bad things, but our spirits remember the good.

This morning, my spirit reminded me of the good things that happened that day :

• my mom, without a thought, offered to drive me four hours to NYC when I was planning on going by myself.

• my sister and sisters-in-law, also without a thought, decided to do the same.

• my brothers and brother-in-law jammed into a single house with all their kids while we took our overnight trip to New York.

• my sister-in-law, who had experience in health insurance, took my phone and fought with my insurance company all day.

• when insurance wasn’t coming through, I decided to pay the required 50% of the $3,000 for the appointment out of our savings account. It was almost the end of the day and I was desperate to be seen. As I entered the waiting room, my sister got on instagram, told everyone what was going on, and posted my venmo account to her story. By the time I reached the counter to pay for the appointment, I had the full amount in my venmo.

• the scan took over 2 hours. Throughout the scan, the doctors kept saying things like, “I see what they were talking about but it doesn’t look that bad.” and “Yes, that one looks terrible, but the other one looks ok.” and “Wow, these are really active babies.” I kept texting the group chat what they were saying, my sister was updating on instagram, everyone was holding their breaths, daring to hope, praying for a miracle.

• after the scan, in the consultation room, the doctor spent a lot of time explaining a lot of things to me. For a long time, those were the only things I could remember. But today the only thing I remembered was how it felt when she said, “many of my patients who have this finding actually make it to about 30 weeks or more without any interventions.”

You can actually listen to that moment right here. And by the way — she was right. We made it to 29 weeks.

transcript :

doctor : ‘Cause many of my patients who have this finding actually make it to about 30 weeks or more. Just, just without any interventions. But it's hard to predict because each pregnancy each placenta is a little bit different.

Kristen (interjecting) : Great, oh God, that’s great. Yea. That’s great.

And here’s the moment I came down into the lobby, where the ladies were waiting for me, and told them the good news.

I never forgot what this felt like, what this was, what it meant. It’s always felt like a beautiful, sacred moment, but the emotions and hope were swallowed by the darkness and fear that followed. The next 10 weeks were a roller coaster of epic proportions and I was alone for most of it.

Nobody was ever waiting for me in the lobby after bad news appointments. No one was there to hold my hand when I went into preterm labor at 26 weeks, on all fours in the waiting room, begging the labor to stop, praying the girls would stay put a little longer. No one was there when I was admitted to the hospital, or when a nurse shook me awake because they couldn’t find one of our babies’ heartbeat and the other was decelerating. No one was there when I developed preeclampsia, went into labor and heard the words, “The babies have to come tonight.” Zach wasn’t allowed to be with me at all, per covid rules. He would wait in the car while I swallowed my tears, shook my head, and whispered, “later.” so we wouldn’t scare the kids. He slept in between the doors of the emergency room until security kicked him out. He rushed to the hospital and made it just as they were rolling me into the OR.

The body remembers the pain and trauma of experiences like that viscerally, but the spirit holds onto the light and waits for the body to allow it to break through.

And it does.
The light always finds a way through.

My trauma anniversaries have come and gone this year and my body seems to have forgotten them. And for the first time I can ever remember, my spirit remembered the good. Not just from this specific experience, but from all of the traumas that came before it. I’m finally healed enough that the light can break through on a gloomy March day and remind me that there was always light in the darkness. I knew it in the moment, but I lost it in the process. And that’s ok. That’s part of it. It’s not a character flaw or a sin or a crime. It’s just the way we heal.

And we do heal.

In this fourth year past the pain of that experience, I am finding that I’m reminded more and more of the good, the light, the grace, the kindness, and the hope that existed alongside the fear and hurt. Those things didn’t make the pain easier to handle. Nothing does. Pain just has to be felt and moved through and processed. But all of those good things aren’t meant to make the pain easier to handle, they’re meant to hold us while it’s happening.

I’m grateful for the grace that held me. For the people that surrounded us and embodied what it means to be the hands and feet of Christ. They carried His hope in their hands and I carried it with me in my body into those lonely hospital rooms and terrifying appointments.

Christ was with me in the fear, his hope held me in the unknown, and he comforted me in the darkness. I knew it then, I felt it then, and finally, on these anniversaries, my spirit is reminding me of those moments. Instead of March being a month long visit to the pain of the past, it’s becoming a celebration of the light in the darkness.

My body is forgetting. My spirit is remembering.

Yours will too.