The Illusion of Rewind

Seventeen now comes with baggage: trauma, motherhood, and the weight of lost years

My phone pinged with a Facebook DM.

“GIRL. HAVE YOU WATCHED The Summer I Turned Pretty??”

Alex and I don’t see each other nearly as much as we want to, but our friendship survives in the trenches of DMs and book-tok thirsting. Before you judge - yes, we’re in our thirties, but we skipped this entire era the first time around.

Spoiler: the Bible does not come with good sex scenes.

I wrote back, “I HAVEN’T!”

She begged me to start it so she’d have someone to scream with and dissect fictional boy drama with, and honestly? How could I say no? Girlhood was kept from me. Not this time. Not by choice.

Fuuuuuuuuuck.

Here’s the thing they don’t warn you about in healing: the grief.
Heavy on the G-R-I-E-F.

People look at you and say, “Why would you grieve? You left. You survived hell. You’re free!” They don’t see the empty spaces inside you, the parts of yourself ripped away and never returned.

Freedom comes with the slow, brutal realization of everything you never got. The milestones. The mistakes. The messy young love. Sex without strings. The child-free freedom. Study abroad. Blackout nights you laugh about the next day. The list goes on.

Healing is staring straight at the ghost of the life they stole from you.

I didn’t expect a teenage love triangle on screen to knock me out like this - head pounding, stomach twisted and wrung out like a washcloth.

Because while the girls around me were learning how to flirt, kiss, and sneak beers at basement parties, my “coming of age” was a checklist:

Date to marry.

No touching. Six inches apart.

Chaperones. No kissing. God first.

No birth control. Children only.

No drinking. No parties. No sleepovers.

No sex. No college. No love stories.

No choice.

Everything I wanted, forbidden. Everything I needed, a sin.

The future wasn’t mine. It was handed to me, pre-packaged, labelled: Trad Wife

No yearning. No girlhood. Just rules.

Here’s the kicker about grief: I can’t rewind my life like some dusty Blockbuster rental and suddenly be seventeen again.

People say, “You can date freely now, you’re free!”
Yeah, okay, and I can also drink bleach with no side effects, right?

The reality is I’ve got what feels like thirty million tangled ropes tied to me - thick, knotted, impossible to shake off: five kids, cult trauma, sexual assault, domestic violence, no education, single motherhood, no money, and a calendar already bursting at the seams with kid sports, school events, and house upkeep.

The freedom of seventeen now doesn’t come with a clean slate. It comes with baggage, and mine fills a damn shipping container.

Before you all get untethered - yes, I am madly, wildly IN LOVE with my boyfriend. I’ve found my Conrad (iykyk). But this blog isn’t about him.

It’s about the grief that sneaks in while you’re healing. The way it blindsides you in the most random, stupid places.

It’s that gut-punch of realizing the best years of your youth weren’t yours at all, they were erased, replaced with bare feet, swollen belly, and the suffocating weight of motherhood, servitude and submission you never chose.

It’s the deep, bone-heavy sigh of knowing that no matter how many years I’ve got left, I’ll never get the chance to be seventeen again - wild, reckless, no strings attached.

That window slammed shut before I even knew it existed.

My phone buzzes. A Facebook DM:
“Welcome to the obsession that is Team Bonrad. So glad I’m not alone.”
“Watch party for the finale??”
“I’m in.”

This is girlhood.

Seventeen ended before it began with dreams ripped away.

But we’re here - clawing, scratching, bleeding, to reclaim the pieces they called ‘of earthly temptation.