Some experiences change your life. Others change the way you understand life itself.
There’s something strange about reaching a point where you can finally talk about what happened to you without feeling as though you’re right back in the middle of it.
For a long time, I couldn’t do that.
I could tell the story. I could explain what happened. I could list the dates, the hospital admissions, the operations, the things that went wrong. But remembering something and actually being able to sit with the memory without your entire body reacting to it are two very different things.
For a while, my body didn’t seem to understand that the worst of it was over.
And honestly, when you’ve spent months living through one frightening experience after another, your brain doesn’t exactly receive a memo saying, Right then, everyone. Crisis over. Back to normal.
Wouldn’t that be convenient?
But here I am, a year on, and something has changed.
Not everything. Not magically. And certainly not in a way that makes me immune to difficult days.
But enough that I’m beginning to look back at that period of my life and ask myself some questions I couldn’t have faced before.
Not just questions about what happened to us, but about what it did to me. My beliefs. My relationships. My understanding of the world. And the person I thought I was before everything changed.
When your world stops feeling safe
October 2025.
I was preparing to welcome my twins into the world. I had imagined their arrival, thought about what life would look like with three children, and tried to prepare myself for the enormous change that was coming.
I wasn’t prepared for what actually happened.
An emergency Caesarean. A high spinal block. My body collapsing, my blood pressure dropping dangerously, and significant blood loss.
Then there was Ethan.
Our tiny boy needed resuscitation. What followed was a prolonged hospital journey, neonatal intensive care, surgery, a bowel perforation, and the terrifying reality of having a baby whose life was genuinely at risk.
He spent around three months in hospital.
There were moments when I was frightened for him in a way I still find difficult to put into words. Moments when I didn’t know what would happen next, when I couldn’t make things better by loving him harder, and when all I could do was keep showing up.
Meanwhile, I was recovering from major surgery myself, trying to navigate my own complications, and attempting to function as a mother to Phoebe and Greta while our family was being pulled in several different directions.
And somewhere in all of that, I lost the feeling that the world was a place I could trust.
I don’t mean that in a dramatic, everything is terrible kind of way.
I mean that the things I’d previously taken for granted no longer felt quite so certain.
My body had been through something frightening. My baby had been through something frightening. The hospital, a place where I expected us to receive care, became associated with fear, helplessness and experiences that left me feeling abandoned.
Home was where I wanted to be, but even home couldn’t immediately make my nervous system understand that we were no longer in the middle of the crisis.
Everyday things could suddenly feel threatening. An illness, a temperature, a child vomiting. Things that other parents might deal with and move on from could send my mind racing towards the worst possible outcome.
I knew, logically, that the circumstances were different.
But knowing something intellectually and feeling safe again are not the same thing.
Trauma has a way of making the past feel horribly relevant to the present.
And I think that’s one of the hardest things to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
You’re not deliberately choosing to be frightened. You’re not looking for drama. You’re not ungrateful for the fact that things have improved.
You’re trying to live your life while a part of you is still reacting to what happened when life felt completely out of your control.
The family we were before, and the family we became
Trauma doesn’t happen in isolation.
It enters your relationships. It changes the atmosphere at home. It affects the way you communicate, the way you cope, the way you respond to one another when everyone’s exhausted and nobody has much left to give.
Ian and I were navigating an experience that neither of us could have fully prepared for. We were trying to be parents, partners and functioning human beings while dealing with an enormous amount of uncertainty and stress.
We had three children with different needs. A baby in hospital. A family life that couldn’t simply be put on hold until everything was okay.
And the person I was before all of this wasn’t quite the person I became afterwards.
Neither was the family dynamic.
I don’t think people always understand how much a prolonged medical crisis can change a family, even after the immediate danger has passed.
There’s the practical aftermath, of course. The appointments, the recovery, the routines, the exhaustion.
But there’s also the emotional aftermath.
The things you carry separately because you don’t always know how to explain them to each other. The ways your priorities change. The disagreements that feel bigger because everyone is already running on empty. The realisation that the life you had imagined has been replaced by something you never asked for.
And then there’s grief.
Not necessarily grief for a person, but for the experience you thought you would have. The birth you imagined. The early weeks with your babies. The sense of security you expected to have. The version of family life that existed in your mind before everything became about getting through the next day.
You can love the life you have and still grieve the life you thought you would have.
Those feelings aren’t mutually exclusive.
I am proud of how far our family has come. I am grateful that Ethan is here, that both twins have reached their first birthday, and that we have been able to make memories outside hospital walls.
But gratitude doesn’t require me to pretend that the journey was less frightening than it was.
And love doesn’t erase what an experience can do to you.
Then there were my beliefs
This is the part I’ve found myself thinking about more recently.
Before all of this, spirituality was an important part of my world. I was interested in spiritualism, the paranormal and the things that sit beyond what we can easily explain.
I was curious about what might exist beyond our everyday understanding of life. I was drawn to questions about meaning, connection, signs, and the possibility that there might be more to the world than what we can see.
Those interests were part of how I understood myself.
And then life happened in a way that shook me to my core.
I found myself confronted with experiences that made me question things I had previously believed, or at least felt drawn towards believing.
I don’t think it was one single moment when everything changed. It was more complicated than that.
When your baby is critically ill, when you are frightened for your own life, when your family is under enormous strain, you start asking questions that don’t necessarily have comfortable answers.
Where is the meaning in something like this?
Why do these things happen?
What do I actually believe about life, suffering, fate, spirituality or whatever might exist beyond our understanding?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: what if some of the things I once felt certain about aren’t things I can be certain about anymore?
I don’t have a neat answer.
I haven’t suddenly become someone who believes nothing. Nor have I arrived at some profound spiritual revelation that explains everything that happened.
If anything, I’ve become more aware of how little I can honestly claim to know.
I can be curious about the paranormal without needing to interpret every unusual experience as a sign.
I can find comfort in spirituality without expecting it to explain suffering.
I can appreciate the beauty and mystery of the world without having to decide that every event has a hidden purpose.
And I can question beliefs that once felt important to me without feeling that I have to replace them with something else immediately.
Maybe that’s where I am now.
Not necessarily rejecting everything I once believed, but giving myself permission to examine it again.
To ask whether something still feels true to me. Whether I believe it because it makes sense to me, because it brings me comfort, because I have experienced something that shaped that belief, or simply because it is what I’ve always believed.
I think there’s a difference between losing your faith in something and becoming willing to question it.
I’m still working out which parts of that distinction apply to me.
And I’m okay with not knowing just yet.
Trauma doesn’t have to become a lesson
There is a particular kind of language we sometimes use around difficult experiences.
Everything happens for a reason.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
You were given this because you could handle it.
I understand why people reach for those explanations. Sometimes they help us make sense of things that otherwise feel unbearable.
But I struggle with the idea that terrible experiences must have some grand purpose to justify the fact that they happened.
I don’t believe Ethan needed to become seriously ill for me to learn something about myself.
I don’t believe I needed to experience what happened during my birth to become a better mother, a stronger person or a more thoughtful human being.
I would have happily learned some of these things through a considerably less traumatic route, thank you very much.
There was no need for the deluxe package.
And I don’t need to turn every painful memory into evidence that the universe was trying to teach me something.
Some things happen, and they hurt. They change us. They leave consequences that take time to understand.
We can grow afterwards without pretending that the suffering itself was necessary.
Because I don’t want to look back at what happened to us and feel obliged to make it beautiful.
It wasn’t beautiful.
There were frightening, lonely, exhausting moments that I would never wish on another family.
There was love, too. There was care. There were people who helped us. There was Ethan fighting his way through an extraordinarily difficult beginning.
All of those things can exist in the same story.
I don’t have to choose between acknowledging the horror and appreciating the good.
A year later, I can remember without living there
One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is how I relate to the memories themselves.
There was a time when talking about Basildon, remembering my hospital admission, or thinking about my wound complications could leave me feeling as though I was right back there.
The memories weren’t simply memories. They could bring the fear with them.
I would find myself mentally revisiting what happened, trying to make sense of it, trying to understand how things had reached that point.
I wanted answers. I wanted reassurance. I wanted to feel certain that nothing like it could happen again.
Through CBT, and through my own experiences of living with chronic anxiety and childhood trauma, I’ve gradually learned that I don’t have to engage with every frightening thought.
I don’t have to argue with anxiety until it finally agrees to leave me alone.
I don’t have to repeatedly prove to myself that I’m safe before I’m allowed to get on with my day.
Sometimes I can recognise what’s happening and let it be there.
Okay. That’s anxiety. I’m not arguing with you.
It’s a surprisingly ordinary response to something that once felt enormous.
And I think that’s part of the change.
I’m not waiting for every uncomfortable feeling to disappear before I allow myself to live.
I’m learning that I can feel uncertain and still make dinner. I can have a difficult thought and still enjoy an afternoon with my children. I can remember something painful without having to spend the rest of the day trying to escape the feeling it brings.
I can look at photographs from that time and see the whole journey, not just the frightening moments.
I can acknowledge that what happened was traumatic without allowing the trauma to become the only thing I see when I look back.
The NICU is part of our story. It isn’t our entire story.
Basildon is part of my past. It isn’t where I am now.
And the person I was in the middle of that experience deserves compassion, not criticism for the ways she coped.
She was frightened. She was exhausted. She was trying to get through something she had never imagined would happen.
She did not need to have everything figured out.
She needed to get through it.
And she did.
I don’t need all the answers anymore
Perhaps the biggest change isn’t that I’ve found a new belief system or that I now understand the world better than I did before.
It’s that I’m becoming more comfortable with not knowing.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I can’t guarantee that my children will never be ill, that life will always be kind to us, or that nothing frightening will ever happen again.
I can’t control every outcome by thinking about it hard enough.
And I cannot undo what happened to us, no matter how carefully I examine the past.
What I can do is be here.
Today, I am still healing, but I am also living.
Those are not the same thing, and I am grateful that there is room for both.
This is where I am, a year after trauma. Not at the end of the story, and not with all the answers. Just here, learning to live with what happened without letting it take everything that comes next.
And for now, that is enough.
