I Didn’t Want My Children to Know—And Then I Did

For many years, Achut Deng’s survival required her to focus, not on the multiple tragedies and near-death experiences that she had endured before reaching the age of 10, but on the safety and stability that she was precariously striving toward. So when she had children of her own, eventually building a middle-class life in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she decided to protect their innocence—an innocence she herself was never afforded—and keep her story to herself. Or, at least, she tried.

Mere days after Deng brought her eldest son home from the hospital in 2007, her past began tearing through the facade she had built. Lying in bed with the baby one night, she pulled a blanket over herself and the boy. As if dropped into a slingshot, she flew back to the moment when her grandmother Koko was killed protecting her; Koko had used her own body, wrapped in an embroidered Sudanese sheet called a , to shield Deng from a spray of bullets barraging the hut where they were hiding. Deng told her doctor about the flashback, and he diagnosed her with PTSD and postpartum depression.