The maddening daily doubt

Every day I wake up and I ask myself - is everything that I remembered real? It just can't be. No, anybody else, but not my father. 

Every day, I ask my husband, who is a geek and a software programmer with a very logical mind: "You've seen most of my panic attacks, you've listened to the pieces of incident as I've been uncovering them from my memory. Are they real? Is there a chance I could just somehow fabricate this all in my mind? Am I crazy?" And every day, he gives me a hug and says: "No, you're not crazy, and from what I've seen, it's all real, it's just very hard to accept it."

Every day I have moments of doubt when I remember the good stuff - my father reading books to me, playing with me and my sister in the grass, dropping me off at the airport just this past November - can the bad stuff be true? How can it be true? It just can't be. 

Every time when I remember yet another incident of abuse, my memory scares me. The accuracy of the details that I have had no recollection of. Like this one. I tell my husband:

"It was 8th of may when my father picked me up for the holidays."

"But," my husband says, "you're wrong, it's 9th of May, that's when the World War 2 Victory is celebrated in Russia."

He goes to look it up online, asks me how old I was.

"Eight."

We look up the calendar together - 8th of may that year was a Sunday. Father picked me up on Sundays because in Russia at the time people worked (and kids went to school) 6 days a week - except Sunday. I go cold inside. I don't want to believe it, yet here it is. How much more proof do I need? I don't know, but every day, every single day, I keep looking for that crack, for the chance that maybe all of this didn't happen, maybe I just somehow made it all up, maybe I really am crazy. And yet, I know I'm not.

I know the pain that I've experienced during numerous panic attacks was real, I know the images I remembered - like the exact pattern of beige fake leather in his car, or the pattern of the green bed cover - are all real. I've asked everyone I could in my family about every single detail - in hopes that when I asked if his car was white, the answer would be blue; when I asked if my coat was brown with pom-poms, the answer would be I had no coat like that; when I asked why I remembered the sticky covering of the ambulance seat, the answer would be I imagined it and there were never hospitalizations for severe diarrhea.

I hope to wake up every day in the different world, and yet I know it's impossible. It's all real, it was there, and it happened to me. I used to read news about sexual abuse, and I felt horrible when I read about incest in particular. I thought: "THIS could never happen to ME". Yet it did. And I have to accept it. I'm still learning, every day, how to do it.