Truth or Dare: Telling the truth is my dare -My Name is Zoe and I am a Glass Child and invisible Child
I grew up with an elephant living in our family. To me growing up in Our family the elephants seem normal. I grew up the youngest child and the only girl in the family with a severely disabled son named Noah. The elephant in the room wasn't my brother Noah but what happened to him.
Growing up with Noah seemed normal that's how it always is in families with an elephant in the room no matter how weird your family is because it's what you know. You can't get a good perspective about how unique it is growing up in it and its through growing up and seeing other families and lots of therapy, how you finally see differences.
The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I'm going to use the 12 step formula for admitting the truth there is something about that sentence that allows me to just lay it all out there without really having to do anything with it right away and it helps me stop beating around the bush and to avoid the painful uncomfortable truth, the elephant.
My name is Zoe. I am the youngest child and daughter of a family who suffered immense trauma and suffering and grief as the result of my older brother Noah being the victim of suspected but never proven shaken baby syndrome. When I was a kid until about 17 years old my parents never told me this, they always told me what the caretaker had said, the clean version I guess, that he had fallen, fallen down a flight of stairs, like those a split level home is what I always imagined in my head, which is what they had told had happened at a daycare 8 years before I was born and in another state.
I had spirit of child but also felt like I was wrapped up in straight jacket of fear, because this story made it feel like life was fragile, we are all Humpty Dumpty needing to be carried around on a silk pillow because if we fall we will break and become like Noah. I remember the first baby I ever held, I was about 12 years old, my neighbor’s first son, I did it, but I was absolutely terrified, terrified that I would touch him and he would turn into Noah. I love Noah, despite his severe disabilities he was absolute joy and sometimes I feel like my saving Angel because I often refer to him as being the happiest person I ever knew in my life, he was always smiling and laughing and I don't know how to explain it but he had an energy about him that was made you pull in close and want to laugh with him. But what I want to say right now is that he was severely disabled and probably the most severely disabled person I ever seen and he went to a school with students that were physically disabled as well, so I've seen my ray of disability he was unable to walk or talk, he couldn't do anything for himself and I have decided recently that he hadthe mentality of like an infant which makes sense because that's the age he was injured so it's like his mentality stayed the age he was injured and but his body grew up.
When I was about 17 years old, I had spent around sometime around babies and was summoned to babysit for friends of my mom and had seen babies take tumbles and this wasn't in the equation but I think about it now as an adult person that I tested this limit myself too as a child I was a very clumsy child as told by my parents and I probably scared the crap out of them helping them relive their trauma because before the age of, I don't know five years old, had acquired at least three different sets of stitches and scared the crap out my mother when I fell out of the grocery cart at Meijers and she had to call the paramedics because I apparently look stunned but I have no memory of it, surprise surprise. I remember waking up in the arms of my mother on a bench that was by a corner in the Meijers as a paramedic took look at me, back in 1994 on South cedar St. Michigan. I didn't get any stitches that day though, that I remember.
This is all to say that around 17 years old I remember having a conversation in the car going somewhere with my mother, talking to her about how Noah's injury must have been like a really hard hit, like he must have been going with some momentum because not all babies end up looking like Noah who have his set of injuries and that's when she told me that they had suspected that he was shaken and it was in the 80s and I don't think they could prove it and I also think my parents suddenly had a very sick baby he was pretty sick at the beginning of the injury so the priority wasn't really to seek justice but to keep their baby alive. The injuries on his brain looked similar to what happens to babies who have had shaken baby syndrome my mother said and when you look up pictures of babies who've survived this kind of trauma they all look like Noah and it's also pretty common that they don't survive, so the fact my brother lived one month sly of 35 years old it's kind of a miracle.
My name is Zoe Guettler. I am the youngest sibling born to parents who were struggling under the weight of immense trauma and the responsibility of taking care of a severely disabled brother -the result of suspected shaken baby syndrome because of this my life was altered before it even began.
I am a glass child, an invisible child, so is my other brother Jonah, I can’t tell his story only mine. Because of this I wasn’t just a child of my own right with my only responsibility to grow up but was on unintentionally burdened with the responsibility to putting my brothers and parents needs above my own before I was born and carrying the burden of emotionally overwhelmed parents.
I have to acknowledge what I have done and how it did affect me, even if there were a lot of blessings from it, I got to acknowledge the weight I was carrying. You can say well I have had weight too; I know it, I know it because I felt it and I carried that as well. Stop being defensive, please see me. If you refuse to see me, I will see myself.
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