Tomorrow, I Take My Little Self Home

I’m 97% packed.

For weeks—really, months—I’ve been making lists, researching, comparing, planning, changing things, and planning some more.

Flights. Hotels. Trains. What to pack. What not to pack. How to get from Waterloo to Brussels, Brussels to Ghent, Ghent to Bruges and Antwerp, and eventually across the border into Germany to see a friend from 40+ years ago.

I’ve learned enough about Belgian trains and the Frankfurt airport to qualify for some sort of unofficial certificate.

I’ve worried about a ninety-minute connection in a German airport where I don’t speak the language. I’ve booked trains between cities I’ve never visited. I’ve figured out transportation systems I’ve never used.

I’m traveling with my daughter through Belgium and Germany for twelve days.

Tomorrow, all the researching stops.

We go.

And underneath everything I have been preparing for is the real reason this trip began.

I am going back to Waterloo.

I was seven years old when I was raped there.

It was the foundational, pivotal event of my life.

I don’t say that because it was the only trauma that happened to me. It wasn’t. There would be seven more years of childhood sexual abuse after that.

But this came first.

After the rape, I regressed.

I started wetting the bed again. I sucked my thumb. I had nightmares. I walked in my sleep.

Then, not long after we moved back to the United States, I started third grade. I turned eight after the school year had already begun.

Nobody looking at me could have known what had happened inside of me.

I don’t think I could have explained it myself.

What I know now is that the rape left me feeling profoundly vulnerable. Something in me had shattered.

I became easier to bully.

I became quieter about what happened to me.

And when the sexual abuse continued for the next seven years, I didn’t tell.

That seven-year-old learned something about the world that a seven-year-old should never have had to learn.

And she shrank.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

That line, attributed to Anaïs Nin, has stayed with me.

Mine shrank.

Not because I was weak.

My courage had been shot out from under me.

For a long time, I lived inside the consequences of that.

Some were obvious. Others took decades to recognize.

Fear. Silence. Vulnerability. The ways I adapted. The things I believed about myself. The roles I learned to play.

A tremendous amount of my life grew out of what happened to that little girl.

But that is not where this story ends.

Because now I am sixty-two years old, and tomorrow I am taking her home.

Not home to stay.

Home to look.

Home to stand outside the house where it happened.

Home so the woman she became can stand beside her and look at that place from the outside instead of carrying it around inside her.

And maybe say the words I have been thinking about as this trip has gotten closer:

I’m free of you.

The part that strikes me now is how much courage it has taken just to get there.

I didn’t really notice it while I was doing it.

I was too busy making lists.

But look at what I’ve planned.

An international trip. Airports and connections. Countries where I don’t speak the languages. Trains between unfamiliar cities.

Waterloo. Brussels. Ghent. Bruges. Antwerp. Cologne. Frankfurt.

Twelve days of figuring things out as we go.

The little girl who learned to shrink grew into a woman who planned all of that.

And tomorrow, she gets on the plane.

I’m not going back hoping that house will heal me.

The healing came first.

I’m going back as the person I became after healing.

I don’t know exactly what I will feel when I see the house.

Maybe I will cry. (who am I kidding… I’m definitely going to cry)

Maybe I’ll be angry.

Maybe it will look absurdly ordinary.

Maybe the thing that has occupied such an enormous place in my internal world will turn out to be bricks and windows and a front door.

I don’t know.

That’s why I want to write this before I go.

Before I know how the story feels from the other side.

Tonight, I’m still here.

Ninety-seven percent packed.

Tomorrow, I take my little self home.

And this time, she isn’t going there powerless.

She’s going with me.

Tonight, I’m still here.

Ninety-seven percent packed.

Tomorrow, I take my little self home.

Just to stand there as the woman I became and let her see that we made it out.

After that, I don’t know.

I don’t know what I’ll feel when I see the house. I don’t know what memory will surface, what will surprise me, or whether the moment will look anything like I’ve imagined it.

That part of the story hasn’t happened yet.

For now, there is only this: the bags are packed, the route is planned, and after more than fifty years, I am finally on my way back.

The next words will have to come from there.