When the Dragons Awoke
Happily N’ever After – When Sandcastles Fall (Part 5)
The quiet dragons weren’t so quiet anymore.
As I looked at my two little princesses, laughter spilling across the floor, an unfamiliar terror rose inside me — fierce, protective, and laced with panic. My heart warned me of something unseen. I could feel the dragons. They hovered near, waiting. I didn’t know if they were after my children… or if they had returned to finish what they started with me.
And still, my mind refused to remember the little girl who had once stood defenseless on those battlefields, fighting enemies far too large for her small hands to hold back.
When trauma strikes — emotional, physical, or existential — the mind’s first task isn’t to understand. It’s to protect. That’s what dissociation does. It hides the unbearable in secret rooms so a child can survive. It’s not weakness; it’s brilliance. It’s mercy in disguise.
But survival has a cost. What the mind buries, the body remembers.
I began to break down physically before I ever knew why. The pain came first — a deep, burning ache that doctors called “chronic fatigue,” then “fibromyalgia,” or maybe “just motherhood.” None of those words explained the fire that lived under my skin or the exhaustion that hollowed me out.
My body was speaking the truth my voice could not: the war wasn’t over.
Muscle memory is more than movement. It’s emotion stored in flesh. Every tremor, every tightening — it was my body’s way of remembering what my mind still refused to see. The hidden rooms were unlocking themselves.
As the castle walls of my adult life were being built — with love, laughter, and little girls’ giggles — something in me finally felt safe.
And when the body senses safety, the mind begins to release.
At first it came in flashes. A sound, a smell, the way my daughters’ laughter echoed — and suddenly I was back on those battlefields of my childhood. My therapist explained that these were triggers, the echoes of stored trauma waking now that my brain believed it could survive remembering.
She gently encouraged me: Don’t run from the dragons this time. Face them. Naming them is how you end their reign.
So I did. But it was brutal. The nights were long. The tears were endless. And the fight — this time — was for my very essence.
All the while, I kept the rhythm of family life beating steady. I smiled, cooked, read bedtime stories. I became the thermometer of our home — measuring warmth, masking cold. On the outside, I looked composed. Inside, I was unraveling.
Because even healed scars ache when touched. Intimacy became complicated. I didn’t know how to let love in without fear. I tried to look confident, but shame whispered lies I still half-believed.
You can’t hide unhealed pain. It leaks through smiles, through fatigue, through the way you pull away when someone reaches too close. I had spent years performing “fine” — but the act was wearing thin.
And yet… this season was teaching me.
It was teaching me that healing isn’t about erasing the past; it’s about reclaiming the pieces of yourself that trauma tried to take.
It was teaching me that my body wasn’t betraying me — it was inviting me to listen.
It was teaching me that love, real love, is born not from perfection, but from the willingness to be seen in our scars.
These lessons — learned in the fire — would become the foundation of how I loved, how I mothered, and how I taught my girls to face their own dragons.
Because every story, every scar, every color in the tapestry… teaches.
And those lessons, whether we mean them to or not, become the threads we pass down.
Healing, I came to learn, is both a breaking and a becoming. It unearths the buried and reweaves the broken, teaching us not only how to survive—but how to live whole.
But living whole—that kind of wholeness born from truth and tenderness—would take me nearly a lifetime to learn.
In that tender, terrifying unraveling, I began to see: what we learn in pain, we later teach in love. The same threads that once bound me in fear would one day become the colors I used to guide my daughters—toward light, toward safety, toward their own voices.
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