HANNAH
“It’s lonely trying to figure out how to be a mom, and then realize you’ll have be a single mom. And everything you have goes into just trying to just survive and there’s no room for anything else. You just survive.”
**Disclaimer before reading this one. Hannah is my little sister. I lived with her during most of the things she is about to explain. Im not sure if this made it easier or harder to tell her story. If she goes into more detail than other women on this project, it’s probably because she felt comfortable talking about these hard things to someone who is more than a stranger. I did my best to keep my bias out of the pictures, and while choosing which parts of her story to put in, but the nature of our relationship means that there will be part of my view of what happened in what you see.
“I remember the first week after my daughter was born, it was really overwhelming. It was just this feeling of constant dread. Like there wasn't really a source of it, but everything just felt off. And I felt this like, almost like a sense of doom. But slowly, after that first week, that feeling of dread went away. Mostly what was there was just surviving, just trying to figure out how to be a mom and also live with the constant little anxieties about how to do this big thing, how to be this person's mom. Overall it didn’t seem too different from my typical anxiety and depression that I had before her because I hyper focused on her. Around that same time I started noticing the feeling of being unsafe. And the sense that I was doing this alone. That I had to protect my daughter from everything going on between my husband and I. So that's what it became in the next few months. I was essentially detaching from everything else going on and just focusing on her, focusing on keeping her safe. My anxiety was based mainly on our surroundings, the things going on around both of us. It was all certainly heightened by the relationship that I had with her dad, and things didn't really change once we separated. I think there was a building of the intensity of some of the arguments, but overall things stayed roughly the same throughout the next few months. And then once the divorce process started, there were no more good moments. He wanted more time with her, but because she was breastfeeding, she couldn't be away from me longer than a few hours at a time. So we'd worked out a Monday, Wednesday, Friday type of schedule that he had time with her.”
“One Friday on his scheduled visit, he came and got her, and shortly after I received a text that he would not be bringing her back. That he would be changing his number, and essentially that I wouldn't see her until the courts worked something out. It felt in my mind & body as if she had been kidnapped, even though that’s not what he or the courts would call it. We called the police and they said that because he was listed on the birth certificate and that the divorce wasn't final, there wasn't anything that they could do to enforce him bringing her back unless he crossed the state line. I didn’t see her for five days.
It didn't actually become real until the police officer was walking away and my sister turned to me and grabbed my face and told me that we were going to go home and that I would pump so that she could still breastfeed when she came home. The finality of pumping, of going home without her, I remember just not being able to really hold up my own weight and I just fell into my sisters arms.”
“The next five days I mainly remember just a lot of the physical aspects of what happened, the constant nausea and inability to eat but then fear of losing my milk. And then every time my milk let down and knowing that I would have to pump. It was all just a constant reminder that she wasn't there. Every moment was just weighed down by the fact that she was gone. I couldn't, I couldn't see past anything and I just, I mean, I barely existed in those five days. It was memorial day weekend, so the courts were closed. My lawyer couldn’t get a temporary restraining order into the courts until Tuesday and the judge didn’t sign off on it until Wednesday night.
It took about an hour or so for the police to convince him to release her. I remember vividly the police officer walking down with her, and just the flood of relief of being able to hold her and just like how comforting it was to feel her weight in my arms. She kept like looking around and looking at me and had this really confused look. Which was just heartbreaking. That was one of the hardest things, thinking that when she was gone, she didn't know where I was or what happened to me. It was genuinely the most devastating feeling. She was only eight months but like what did she understand, did she think that I, I left her? I was worried she thought I abandoned her. I mean, I, I really, I couldn't, I couldn't think about her when she was gone. Like anytime she came up I had to push it down. I had to push any thought of her away. But I said a lot of very simple prayers, not even a full sentence just pleading over and over that our ancestors, that the women who came before us, the mothers and grandmothers, would be there, that they would be surrounding her and that she wouldn't be scared, that she would know things would be okay. Which out of everything, that was the only thing that gave any sort of comfort throughout the whole space. I knew that she ultimately wasn't being mistreated but I didn’t know where she was and she'd only ever known being with me at home. We had only ever been a few hours apart throughout her whole life. It was just absolute devastation that she was ripped away. She had been taken from me.”
“Once we got her home, we got back to our regular routine. She picked up breastfeeding again really easily. But I remember being surprised just by how overwhelming the grief was that I felt, even though she was home. And it wasn't something I could really talk about, like she was home. So things were okay, or at least that what I felt like it should be. But there was still so much anxiety about what was going to happen with the divorce and how that was going to play out. And once her dad had regular visitations again, the constant panic every time I would have to give her over again. Whenever I had any sort of interaction with him, anytime I saw a car that looked like his, the day leading up to him having a visitation and then getting her back and then, you know, knowing that I would have to do it all over again, it just, it never ended. That panic stayed for months. I felt it all the time. It’s gotten better, but it’s definitely still there.”
“We're about six months out from when he took her, and I’ve started to feel some hope again. A few weeks afters he was born I got in back into therapy. And so because of that, and just with time, I have finally felt power in my voice. We’ve been working in therapy specifically to try and help me to feel that I have a voice again. But especially those first few months after she had been taken, I mean, I, I lived in anxiety and I was completely detached from everything. I noticed that I felt less attached to my daughter as well. But she was still the one thing that I felt that I had an attachment to, everything else was too much. Everything else was too heavy. I couldn't think about what had happened. And when I had to, when it came up, I talked about it without any emotion, completely disassociated from it. And that's something that I’ve done for years and didn’t know it. But that's how I've dealt with any pain, any trauma that I've gone through. So now I’m at the point where I'm able to see it and recognize it. I'm slowly starting to allow some things in. But it's coming very, very slowly.”
“This place that I'm at now, just this very gray space of, I know that it's happening, I see how detached I am, and I can often feel myself disassociating from when things get too overwhelming. But I haven't learned enough to stop it. And part of me doesn't want to because it still feels too much. I see just how numb I am and how that's affected everything, how it's affected the good things, how it's affected the joy. I haven't been able to create since this all started. I’ve stopped painting, I've stopped taking pictures. I have tried to write the feelings that I've had. When I start to disassociate, I've tried to sit down and write, but I rarely get out more than a few sentences. I have a hard time actually allowing myself to fully open up and feel it enough to form full sentences. It’s hard seeing what I want, seeing that I want to be able to create and connect and not being able to. And just how lonely that can be. It’s lonely trying to figure out how to be a mom, and then realize you’ll have be a single mom. And everything you have goes into just trying to just survive and there’s no room for anything else. You just survive.”
All images were shot on HP5 +3 and developed by theFINDlab