Intergenerational trauma genetic
But the fear they elicited stayed deep inside me. Since I wasn’t supposed to be listening, I never spoke about these late-night reminiscences. The adults would put my sister and me to bed and then stay up talking about “the war.” But of course I was still awake, and listening, and could hear all kinds of scary things. When I was a young girl, we would sometimes drive up to Montreal to visit my father’s parents, Melly and Genek, whom I called Boma and Saba.
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It was deeply troubling and very strange. Despite the thousands of miles and more than fifty years of time separating my family’s traumatic wartime experiences from that of Ari’s birth, I found myself reliving the trauma. He had lived through World War Two as a young child in Europe. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. No, I was terrified because I was caught in a waking dream, that of a parallel universe, one in which I had given birth in a different time and place, in which an unspeakable horror was in store for me and for my child. My husband, Danny, was a bit scared in that way, but for me even the waking up at night to feed baby Ari was a cakewalk compared to the stress-filled, sleep-deprived years of my residency. Feeding and caring for my sturdy little son was not difficult for me. I had already taken care of hundreds of newborn babies, many of them premature or sick. And I don’t mean just the regular “oh my God I have a newborn what do I do” type of terrified. We were newly settled in a lovely community. Danny was working as a psychiatrist in a local practice, and I had four months’ leave before I would be starting work in a pediatric practice.
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Ari’s room held a light-colored wooden crib and changing table and a pretty lamp his aunt had painted for him, and sported a good-sized window which looked out onto a leafy street. We had just moved into a little carriage house in Newburyport, and had fixed up the smallest bedroom as a nursery. I could see Ari was a strong and robust baby.
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As a pediatrician I had more experience than most new moms. I really was not an overly anxious new mother. He had arrived ten days after his due date, pronounced healthy, and after four days at Newton Wellesley Hospital his father and I drove him home, me sitting beside him in the backseat because, like every new mother, I was worried he would stop breathing back there and who would know? But I only did that the one time, then I sat up front like a normal person, confident Ari would survive the car ride. It was the spring of 1997, and I had a newborn baby.