How I Soothed Childhood Trauma with my Love of the Power Rangers
The following essay discusses mental illness, suicidal ideation and childhood sexual assault for those who may be sensitive to such topics.
They don’t tell you about all the small ways that children can break you open until you have one. I didn’t know that Christmas 2020 would be the last Christmas I would ever celebrate in my house. My wife and I had brought our wrinkly newborn home a month prior. Our first family Christmas tree stood lopsided in the living room, double wrapped in a string of red and green bulbs that glowed softly beside our baby’s beige jungle themed bassinet. “The cats are going to knock it over,” my wife told me as I struggled to put it up, and I agreed. That very night all three of our black cats took an immediate interest in the tree, loafing under the plastic branches and pawing gleefully at the round bulbs that hung from them. The prophecy of it falling over was fulfilled when our most athletic and agile cat, Zuko, leapt into the tree’s waiting embrace. I weighed the base of our fallen tree with books from our shelf while my wife nursed our baby. She was on maternity leave for the next month. I put on Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas album and let the angelic music fill the room while I worked on lesson plans for school. We sat at separate ends of the living room, her in the immediate glow of the red and green lights on the couch cradling the baby, and me on the outer edge on the armchair glued to my open laptop, click-clacking away for work near to the family I had built with my wife, but feeling myself slipping farther away from them both with every stroke of my keyboard.
While the house slept later that night, I sat awake and held hands with my mania as had become routine for months. I was told I was a good teacher, but I never believed it. My school district was doing distance learning for our students in light of the pandemic, and I was struggling to adapt. I hyper fixated on my lesson plans into the early morning, running purely on black coffee and adrenaline from a burst of creativity, and when I was finished I wrote one of many suicide notes in my journal and went to lay down next to my wife before leaving for work a few hours later. There were many nights where I crawled out of my own skin and nowhere felt like home. When school let out for winter break, my restless body left the house when all others in the house rested, and searched for peace on night drives. I could not feel home with my wife and child, and so I sought after it in the dark on lonely country roads under clear night skies, Underneath the Stars reverberating through my car speakers loud enough to sink into my bones, hoping that the melodic vibrations would shock some life back into me so that when I pulled back into our gravel driveway and my tears had dried, I would resemble a person again.
They told me babies change everything. But people only talk about the changes that don’t really matter. People joked about how we would lose sleep. I’d go back and lose a thousand hours of sleep if it meant that I could be mentally present for the first four months of our child’s life. They said babies cry often. I would love to rewind time and hear our firstborn’s cries in my wife’s arms without my mania making every touch and sound feel like fire under my skin. People told us babies are needy. I would give anything to once again feel our newborn quietly sleeping skin to skin on my chest because it was the only place they felt safe enough to rest their big brown eyes their first month of life on this earth. We were prepared for these changes because we wanted these changes and because we love and wanted our child. What they don’t tell you is how babies will make you come face to face with yourself. You will go digging in parts of you that you thought you had hidden away forever, and what you find there will destroy you in the same way as the day you buried it.
Adults can forget that they were once children. Young, human, and in need of protection. My wife and I were in my childhood bedroom at my parent’s house when I was flipping through a photo album with my baby pictures. I see a round-faced baby at peace seated next to a laundry basket, and then a joyful kindergartner in uniform before they morph on the next page into an uncomfortable grade schooler in tight curls with a forced smile in a pink dress. I’m not much older than 7. I notice quickly how unhappy I am, and I feel grief instantaneously for the child in the picture who wasn’t really a child at all, and then for me; standing there and realizing it at that very moment. When we get home that night, I put on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie VHS in the TV VCR combo and hold our baby while I cry.
Before my wife and I decided on a name for our baby, I called them Kimberly Hart. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had a chokehold on me and my brother’s upbringing. We spent hours together playing out scenes from the Power Rangers movie. I was always the pink one, because being a girl had eluded me in my youth, and I felt I could clumsily slip on girlhood with the white trimmed, pink skirted Pink Ranger in the safety and pretend of the darkness of our parent’s basement. I ensconced myself in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers sheets on the bottom bunk of our shared bed in our corner room on the second floor. When we grew older and had separate rooms side by side, we sang songs and told stories to one another through the walls under the cover of night. I didn’t realize until the middle of the pandemic twenty years later, after a lingering memory embedded under my skin kept bobbing to the surface of my waterlogged dreams, that he had suffered the same sexual abuse as I did at the hands of a trusted family member. We never spoke a word of it to one another back then, and until I thought to ask of his memories to corroborate my body’s memories, part of me thought, hoped, that what happened wasn’t real. But it was, and the truth had scratched and crawled its way out of me and was demanding to be reckoned with. He remembered it all, and admitted after a long pause in the DMs of our exchange on Instagram that he too had violated me on one occasion. I thought I would feel horror at his admission, and at times when I’m lost inside of my own head I allow myself to feel the reality of that horror, but on that night I simply felt validation, and above all less alone.
Stories saved us then. They saved us both as we crafted them through the thin walls separating our bedrooms. They tethered us to one another as we consumed movies and television shows about found families and supernatural heroes until we eventually grew older and lived apart. Always, I remembered that pretending to be Kimberly Hart was the last time I was a child at play in all of its unbridled joy. Sprawled out on a soft white carpet in front of the blue glow of a brown box television in my parent’s basement, my brother and I watched the Power Rangers overcome another evil, and it was the last time my body would feel free.
As I watched Kimberly grow inside of my wife, we prepared for their arrival by filling their nursery with stories. Two bookcases overflowed with wacky and gentle adventures alike. Tales of Black children displayed prominently on hardcovers with wild, wooly hair like mine were loved and held up to the light. I meet myself again at 7 years old while I rock our baby in this room and fill them with stories. When I hold them in my arms, I hold myself there too and slowly learn to love her again.
It’s spring. My wife and I have rearranged our entire world for our baby. I come home from my night shift, and while my wife is resting for her new remote job that begins in the morning, I pick up our fussy baby from the nursery and bring them to our bedroom. I lay them down on my chest and feel their tight coily hair tickle the underside of my chin as I click “next episode” on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. As they feed from their bottle, the show begins in all of its bright, boisterous glory just as I remember it. I mime my fingers in time to the sweet guitar riff of the theme song on their soft stomach, and they giggle. My wife wakes up for a brief moment to look at us, squints, and rolls back onto her side to go back to sleep. They finish eating, and are asleep before the teenagers with attitude on the laptop screen are able to settle into their dilemma for the episode. I set the empty bottle on the nightstand on my side of the bed where I’ve tucked away suicide notes from the winter under books and video games. They were written hundreds of years ago, in a different time and by a different person. The angry, crumpled pieces of paper are buried under stories where characters dare to choose vulnerability over callousness, stories where friendship soothes the deepest wounds, and stories where a person’s hardest truths are met with compassion. I reach for these stories when my body tightens because of lingering terror that it holds inside and wants to run from a danger that is no longer present. My body will always remember, but I know now I don’t have to forget my stories, or myself, again.
I lay our baby down in their crib, they whine softly, and so I sit in the rocking chair until they drift off to sleep again. My body is calm and I am home.
