EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

Gallery

Notebook

Music Playlist

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Returning To The Life That Could Have Been

May 19, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

I used to think coming home would be obvious. That if I ever came back here in any real way, I would know exactly what to feel, how to stand, where to place my hands, what to name the ache rising up through me. I thought return would announce itself as closure, or triumph, or grief, or maybe some cleaner mixture of the three. I imagined it would feel like stepping over a threshold and finally understanding what all the years had been trying to say.

There is a kind of violence in recognition after too much time has passed. I walk through these rooms and my body knows things before my mind catches up. It knows how to move here even when I do not know how to feel here. That familiarity unsettles me more than the ghosts. Because the ghosts, at least, are honest.

And I am left trying to understand what it means to return to a place that never stopped existing, even after I had to stop belonging to it.

I keep looking at old photographs. I tell myself I am sorting them. That is the practical word, the adult word, the word people use when they need to make grief sound organized enough to fit on a table.

I make piles. I turn pictures over. I look for dates that are sometimes written on the back in my mother's handwriting. I try to place events in sequence. A summer. A holiday. A birthday. A corner of the yard before the neighbor's house burned. A room before the wallpaper changed. A version of my mother before age had leaned into her shoulders. A version of my father before I understood the full nature of his control. A version of myself before the world began correcting what was never wrong.

The girl in those photographs is me. I know this. I understand the fact of it. But she does not always feel like me.

She is small and bright-eyed, already observant in the way children become when the adults around them cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth. She is often dressed in ways my father would have hated if he had noticed too closely. She is standing in yards, sitting on furniture, squinting into sunlight, holding objects I cannot remember caring about, looking directly at the camera as if she already suspects that photographic evidence will matter someday.

I want to know her. That is what frightens me.

Most people look at childhood pictures and say, that was me. They laugh at the haircuts, the clothes, the awkwardness, the lost rooms, the old cars, the adults who seemed permanent until they weren't. Their memories might be imperfect, but the line between then and now remains mostly intact. The child is earlier, the adult is later, and the life between them is understood as a continuation.

I do not experience it that cleanly. I look at those pictures and feel as though I am viewing the childhood of someone I inherited. A girl whose records were transferred into my custody after some unnamed disaster. I recognize the face. I recognize the rooms of moms house. I recognize the posture, the guardedness, the way she stands slightly apart from the frame even when she is in the middle of it. But there is a separation there I do not know how to erase. It feels as though I have now returned, thirty years later, to determine whether she is still here.

I have started to think of my life as having happened in three distinct movements, though even that sounds too orderly for the reality of it. Lives do not divide themselves neatly while they are happening. They bleed into each other, argue, overlap, and leave remnants behind.

There was Emily the girl. There was Lieutenant Slatin. And now there is Emily, again, returned home after surviving all the systems put her through.

Emily the girl lived here before the interruption.

She was complicated. Some children are, and I certainly was. I was bright in ways that irritated adults who preferred intelligence to arrive in adult-coded packaging. I was autistic before the word was allowed to mean anything useful in my life. I was queer before I had enough privacy to hold the word safely. I was female in the plain, lived, obvious way of my own body and mind, even while my father treated that truth as something to be administratively contested. I was intersex before doctors and institutions settled on any language they could use without choking on their own discomfort.

But inside myself, I was not confused. That is one of the things people misunderstand most consistently. They assume complexity produces uncertainty. Sometimes it does. In my case, complexity produced conflict outside of me, not within me.

Other people were confused. Other people disagreed. Other people built elaborate systems to avoid admitting what my mother already knew, what my closest friends understood, and what I knew in the plain, private authority of being alive in my own body.

I was a girl. I was Emily. I loved other girls before I understood what love would eventually cost me.

This house held that girl. Not gently, not consistently, and not without harm, but it held her for a short time. In that first life, home was still a word I trusted.

It was imperfect. It was frightening. It was governed by my father's moods, my mother's compromises, and the strange, shifting rules of a family system that could praise me in one breath and erase me in the next.

It was where I watched the weather change through the same windows year after year. It was where my mother and I built a language made of glances, errands, shared jokes, and the kind of understanding that does not always rescue a child, but does sometimes keep her from vanishing completely.

It was also where my father tried to make a son out of his daughter. He failed. That failure shaped everything that followed.

There are failures that should be celebrated only because they prevented a larger crime from succeeding. My father's version of me never fully took. It moved through paperwork, institutions, introductions, and certain public settings, but it never truly lived. It was a document-level fiction, a social performance built for the comfort of adults who thought authority could outrank reality.

I moved through it because I had to. I answered when survival required it. I learned to let the wrong name pass, pretending it didn't bother me, when correcting would have cost too much.

That is what children do when the truth has no official protection. They preserve it quietly.

They hide it in posture, in friendships, in private language, in the way they look at themselves in mirrors when no one else is home. They carry it underneath clothing, beneath school records, behind the face they use to get through another day. They keep a version of themselves alive in the only place authority cannot reach without consent.

I did that. Emily the girl did that. She kept herself intact until the world finally forced the interruption.

At sixteen, the door closed behind me, and the first life ended. Not symbolically. Not cleanly. Not in a way that anyone standing outside the story would necessarily understand.

From a distance, it might have looked like teenage conflict, family disagreement, rebellion, stubbornness, the familiar narrative people reach for when they do not want to examine the machinery of exile. But from inside the moment, it was much simpler. Shelter had become conditional on denial. Family had become conditional on compliance. Home had become a place that could be revoked if I refused to become smaller, quieter, less queer, less female, less myself.

I left.

I have written that sentence in different forms for years, and it still does not capture the scale of it.

I left with things that could fit in a car. I left with Penfold. I left with enough cash to suggest motion but not security. I left with books, a camera, notebooks, clothes, instinct, rage, and a kind of hope so primitive it barely had language. I left without the ceremonial protections people like to pretend young people have. No safety net. No soft landing. No adult plan waiting underneath the disaster. Just movement.

Survival has a way of disguising transformation. It does not announce the moment adaptation becomes identity. You do not wake up one morning and understand that the person who left home has started becoming someone built for conditions she never should have had to endure. You just keep going. You make decisions. You take the job. You sleep where you can.

You learn which strangers are safe enough, which rooms have exits, which offers come with invisible prices. You learn the difference between loneliness and danger. You learn that hunger is not always physical. You learn that movement can feel like freedom even when it began as displacement.

And then, somewhere inside all that motion, I found the work. Or the work found me. It is difficult now to separate the two.

Fire and rescue did not enter my life as a career in the ordinary sense. I did not drift into it as a respectable job with benefits, a uniform, and a set of predictable expectations. It arrived like a system that finally matched the intensity I had been carrying internally for years.

There was urgency. There were rules that mattered. There were consequences. There were people who needed something done immediately, correctly, and without emotional performance. Just like my life thus far, there were no second chances.

The work demanded judgment, but it did not ask me to pretend that what was happening was not happening. That distinction mattered. I became good at it because I had to, and because I understood pressure before anyone trained me to use it.

People sometimes talk about public safety work as if courage is the central attribute. It is not. Courage is too cinematic a word for something that mostly runs on training, repetition, pattern recognition, fatigue management, dark humor, trust, stubbornness, and the ability to keep moving when common sense tells you to hesitate.

What mattered was not fearlessness or bravery. I was never fearless. What mattered was function. Could I read the scene? Could I understand the pattern? Could I do what had to be done before the moment ran out of tolerance? Could I hold enough information in my head under conditions that made ordinary thinking fail? Could I be exact when exactness mattered?

I could. That ability became the spine of my second life.

Lieutenant Slatin did not replace Emily the girl all at once. She formed gradually, call by call, shift by shift, uniform by uniform, patch by patch. She formed in stations under fluorescent light, in ambulances at three in the morning, on roads glazed with winter, and in places where death had already arrived and someone still needed to be calm enough to say so.

She formed in the space between command and grief, between competence and the cost of competence, between showing up and carrying home what could not be shown. She did work that needed doing, and she did it well.

But she was also an interruption extended over decades. That is the part I am only now beginning to understand.

The fire service became the life between lives. It was not a detour. It was too large for that. It consumed too many years, too much identity, too much of my body, too much of my sleep, too much of my memory, too much of my idea of purpose.

It became its own reality, with its own rules, language, rituals, wounds, loyalties, betrayals, and forms of love. It took the girl who had been expelled from home and gave her a place where being necessary could temporarily stand in for being held.

That sounds harsher than I intend it to.

The job did hold me in some ways. Not softly. Never softly. But it held me through structure, expectation, and use. It gave me something to do with all the vigilance my childhood had installed. It gave my pattern recognition a purpose. It gave my calm under pressure an audience that needed it. It gave my body a task. It gave my mind a system. It gave my life direction when the original map had been torn up and thrown out by a man who thought control was destiny.

For a long time, I confused the two because the job required me to. If something meaningful hurts, you tell yourself the hurt is part of the meaning. If something necessary breaks you down slowly, you tell yourself the breaking is honorable.

If people praise your steadiness, you start hiding the cost of staying steady because you do not want to disappoint the story they have built around your usefulness. A woman in command learns very quickly that composure is not only expected; it is consumed.

Lieutenant Slatin was consumed. Sometimes by the work. Sometimes by the culture. Sometimes by the people who depended on her without understanding that dependence is still emotional weight. Sometimes by the part of me that believed usefulness was the safest form of love.

I was good at the work. That is not vanity. It is the record. That kind of ability comes with a price people like to admire from a distance.

The second life demanded everything from me, then acted surprised when I eventually had nothing left to give.

When I retired, I thought I was betraying the job by leaving. I had spent so many years inside urgency that ordinary time felt almost suspicious. Mornings without listening to dispatch over the radio. Nights without calls. Dinner tables without one ear listening for my pager to go off.

Civilian life did not welcome me back so much as stand there, blinking, while I tried to remember how to enter it.

By then, Emily the girl felt impossibly far away.

I had photographs of her. Fragments. Furniture. Objects. A pine tree outside a window. The smell of old paper. The memory of my mother's voice. The outline of girlhood hidden inside a house that had belonged, for too long, to the man who tried to deny it.

I knew she had existed. I knew I had been her. But knowing is not the same as continuity. There were too many years between us. Too much smoke. Too many sirens. Too many dead. Too much command voice. Too much motion. Too many moments where the person I had to be left no room for the person I had been.

And then life did the thing it sometimes does, which is to wait until you have stopped expecting restoration before handing you something that looks almost like it.

My father died first.

His death did not free me all at once, though I once thought it might. Control lingers in paperwork, habits, money, houses, family stories, and the nervous system. Men like him do not disappear simply because their bodies stop. They leave instructions behind. They leave legal structures, emotional weather, distorted records, trained silences, and rooms where their rules still seem to stand after they are gone.

For many years after his death, I still lived in relation to him. Against him. Around him. Despite him. The absence of a tyrant is not automatically freedom. Sometimes it is only the removal of the visible source while the machinery keeps running.

Then Mom died. Nothing prepared me for that.

Not the fire service. Not all the deaths I had witnessed. Not the clinical familiarity with final breaths, hospital rooms, pronouncements, paperwork, the administrative aftermath of bodies leaving the world. None of it made any sense when the person was my mother. The mind knows categories. The body knows loss. They are not the same system.

My mother was imperfect, complicated, sometimes emotionally unavailable, sometimes constrained by fear, marriage, habit, and the limits of her own survival. She did not save me from everything. She agreed to things I still struggle to forgive. She stayed quiet when I needed her voice. She made compromises that cost me. She loved me, and she failed me.

But she also knew me. Not always fully. Not always bravely. But more than anyone else in that first life. She knew the girl. She knew Emily before the world built arguments around her. She kept photographs my father would have destroyed. She saved objects. She preserved evidence. She left paperwork where it could speak after she no longer could. She handed me, in death, the strange, unwieldy gift of return.

Mom knew me as Emily whenever my father was not around.

The house was left to me and Amelia in moms will. That sentence still feels unreal.

The insurance companies wanted to know what I planned to do with the house. That is a reasonable question in the world they live in. A big house needs a plan. A big house needs heating, maintenance, insurance, locks, repairs, decisions. A big house is liability, square footage, numbers, risk, possible income, possible sale. They suggested renting it. Airbnb. Selling it. All the sensible possibilities people offer when they are standing far removed from the emotional jurisdiction of a place.

I told them I did not know yet, but I wanted to keep it forever, and go there whenever I felt nostalgic or homesick.

They said it was a big house. They said I could rent it out. They said my plan did not make sense.

I told them it did not need to. Not everything meaningful has to justify itself to the economy. Not everything sacred has to become useful. It is the place where I grew up. That is worth more than rent. That is worth far more than sense.

Besides, sense is overrated when it is defined by people who have never been exiled from their own beginning.

I am here now with Amelia. Her presence alters the structure because she is my wife, and she is here openly, without euphemism, without apology, without the absurd family choreography that once turned women I loved into "friends" and private truths into logistical problems.

Amelia moves through these rooms with her own history of rejection, her own autism, her own sense of what it means to be misread by families who preferred comfort over truth.

Peace feels unnatural after a life built around interruption. I do not know what ordinary women feel when they return to childhood homes after their parents are gone. I imagine there is grief, perhaps discomfort, perhaps the strange rearrangement of becoming the oldest living authority over rooms where one was once a child. I imagine they touch banisters, open drawers, stand in kitchens, remember things inaccurately, and forgive themselves for it. I imagine they feel the sadness of time moving in one direction.

My return feels less linear than that. It feels as though I am stepping into the life that could have been, but only after living the life that happened instead.

There are moments here when I can almost sense the alternate version of the house. Not imagined exactly. More like an adjacent possibility.

A version where I was never forced out. A version where my girlfriends came through the front door and my father had no authority to turn love into a disciplinary issue. A version where my mother became brave earlier. A version where I grew up as Emily without the constant need to defend moms choice for correctly calling me that. A version where I left for adulthood in the ordinary way, not through exile. A version where coming home for dinner did not require me to split myself into acceptable pieces.

People praise resilience because they do not have to live inside the cost of it. They admire the woman who can return from fire, from exile, from trauma, from family collapse, from institutional erasure, from every system that misread her and still somehow failed to stop her.

They like the shape of survival after it has been cleaned up enough for public language. They call it inspiring when they do not have to wake up with the nervous system it produced.

I am not ungrateful for my strength. But I am no longer willing to pretend it arrived free.

That is not something I can explain to an insurance company. It is not something I need them to understand. There are truths that become weaker when translated for people who will only ever hear them as impractical.

Usefulness is not the only measure of whether something deserves to remain. Some things remain because they must.

Some things remain because losing them would create a wound no amount of time or money could heal. Some things remain because the woman who owns them was once a girl who had no say in leaving.

I think about my parents often when I am here, though not always in the way people might expect. My father is easier to understand now that he is dead, which is not the same as forgiving him. Death simplified his power. It reduced him from force to record. From authority to memory. From living threat to historical fact.

He was a brilliant man, yes. But the part that nobody saw was that he was also a controlling man. An abusive man. A man who mistook his expectations for truth and his discomfort for law. A man who tried to bend my life toward his own unfinished mythology and died without understanding that reality had already outlived him.

My mother is more complex. Love always makes the record more complicated. I miss her with a force that still surprises me. I miss the ordinary parts most. Her voice. Her timing. Her strange little comments. Her way of making certain absurdities tolerable because she understood exactly how absurd they were.

I miss being able to call her when something ridiculous happens. I miss the person who knew about life before I had language for it. I miss the witness. I miss the woman who saved the pictures, even when she could not save me from everything else.

But I also sit here now and understand what she allowed. That is part of the record too. Love that requires historical inaccuracy is not love; it is editing.

I loved her. She loved me. She failed me. She protected me. She stayed. She compromised. She left me the house. She knew I was her daughter. She knew more than she said. She said enough at the end to matter.

And now I am here with Amelia, whom she absolutely adored. Perhaps that is what she wanted.

Thirty years later, I am standing in the house where the interruption began, living something that feels like the life that could have been.