If You Tell a Lie

by Lucinda Berry

We all picked our sides, and I fell on the side of wearing her shoes. I knew trauma could break you. Dismantle your insides. Pull your sense of reality right out from underneath you. Twist you and push you into doing things you never thought you were capable of doing.

Becoming a mom cracked me wide open and sent a flood of memories I’d long buried and forgotten to the surface.

When the person you trusted and relied on the most in the world turned out to be someone else, you never looked at the world in the same way again.

It’d taken me so long to put myself back together; what would I do if this shattered me again? I didn’t have another rebuild in me. You can only come back from that kind of bottom once.

she’d stopped being who she’d been to me, and I’d never gotten that person back. Sometimes there were wounds you just couldn’t heal from, even after they became scars.

Funny how when you bare your darkness to others, they feel free to share theirs with you.