Fears

At the time I’m writing this, a time that will be long ago for you by the time, if ever, you read it, you’ve been going through a prolonged phase of fear of the dark, especially the solitary dark. You’re seven; it’s not that surprising, but you’re generally a brave girl, so theories for your fears have been tempting. Your mother and your grandparents vote that the cause is too much exposure to Lord Voldemort, and you do seem to fear Rowling’s villain, but I’m skeptical that the culprit’s him, and I have reasons.

There’s the conundrum of where and when your fear begins. The more I think it over, the less certain I am how far back it actually goes. It might not even be yours. More than once, I’ve gone to the woods with your mother when she was exhilarated by the prospect of a long hike while I waited for her, only to have her return quickly and insist she could go no further alone. It’s not the actual risk that gets to her, as she will happily camp and wander by herself for days across desert landscapes twice as dangerous as any forest in California or BC. She used to fixate on bears as the problem, but she mostly conquered that fear through a few random, harmless encounters. In any case, I think it was the shadow she made from the idea of bears that terrified her, not the bears themselves. Her fear of going into the woods alone still comes and goes, but when it strikes her, it’s exactly like your fear of entering an empty room in the house. It’s an abrupt, stubborn, absolute refusal to go into a particular shadow zone alone. I could never reliably predict when her fear would hit her, as I can’t entirely predict when your fear will possess you, but once in the grip, neither one of you will budge. Coaxing or reasoning with either of you only makes you more upset. I wouldn’t claim that it was down to genetics, not without better evidence, but the pattern seems inherited, in some way. 

As an infant and a toddler, you were always a light sleeper, equally prone to wake from nightmares or happy dreams of flying alike, but never in need of more light. It crept up on you after you reached about four: a nightlight, a soft lamp, a hallway light all night. You were five when you started annoying your mother by demanding that one of us accompany you, at least as far as the bathroom door, every time you had to go pee. This didn’t seem to be a problem for you at school or outdoors, just at home. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that you initially did this only when you didn’t want the two of us talking without you in the room, perhaps because you knew we talked about you a lot, or you were jealous of our affection for each other, or perhaps because you felt your presence could prevent us from ever getting upset with each other. 

For at least a year, as I recall, you would be fine moving around the house on your own so long as you and I were home alone, but if the three of us were in the kitchen or at the table, you would invariably beg for one of us to follow you if you wanted for any reason to leave the room. Fear was just an easy excuse at first that gradually became more real. By the time you were six or six and a half, you started insisting that I stay in a room with you or accompany you into an empty room, whether your mother was around or not. I suspect this may also have had something to do with an inherited character trait of yours, but one that neither your mother or I have, a longing to be around people, someone at least, almost all the time. I’m a terrible hermit and your mother says she played at her happiest for hours alone as a child. It drives her to distraction when the only way for you to be contented by yourself is if you’re immersed in a screen for a while. 

Again, I suspect inheritance, and this time it would almost have to be genetic. My father, the grandfather you never knew, was social in exactly the same way as you. Throughout his life, he found it depressing, not to say distressing, to be in a room or a house alone. His own mother was convinced that this was down to his invalid childhood, but I was an invalid kid, too, and I was uninterested in too many visitors, usually happier with a stack of books and a window with a good, green view. 

So, I think you begin already with a bit of your mother’s abrupt fear reflex and a bit of your paternal grandfather’s loathing of being very long alone. Toss in a bit of the typical kid fear of dark closets and such. But why has it amplified more recently? The answer no one seems to want to touch is that your mother and I broke up. 

Indeed, breaking up seems more of an exact description than a dead metaphor in our case. We disintegrated as a couple, bit by bit, over the past two years. I won’t go into all the reasons here, and I’d bet that by the time you’re old enough to read this you know them well, maybe understand them better than I now do. But you’ve got a sensitive emotional barometer, and you probably could always tell. You may have sensed it before we could tell or admit it to ourselves.

And simply, physically, well before we fully separated, you were spending more and more time with one of the other of us, less and less time with us both. Your mother went on meditation retreats and long solo camping trips lasting as much as weeks. I took you to school each morning but came home late. For two weeks, I was on a road trip across the breadth of Canada. And so forth. Likely, it all cemented the sense at the base of your awareness that, whenever  you were with one or the other of us, there was no one in the other room, anymore.

I’ve been living with your grandparents the past few months, and I’ve noticed your fear seems less when you’re with all of us. Grandpa Joe is up early and stomps about the kitchen, then heads downstairs to his office. Grandma is upstairs on the second floor much of the time, always available for visits and coming down throughout the day to see what is going on with us. It’s your sort of world, where there’s always someone with you who loves you and someone else who loves you somewhere about the house. Ditto when your grandparents stay with you and your mother down south.

But there was that one weekend when Grandma and Grandpa Joe were down there with Mama, while you were up here with me in the big, three-level house, mostly empty. It snowed heavily for two days and then it really was just us in our snow globe. We binged on your Harry Potter books and rewatched the first two or three of the Potter movies, along with more little kid stuff. It was fun. We snuggled and stayed in our PJs and spoiled ourselves with a bowl of ice cream each night. But as full as the house felt to me, given that you were in it, I could see how empty it seemed to you with only me.

And that’s what fear is, ultimately, for all of us, the dread of not enough. Oh, there’s the sharp shock of startlement and fright, that’s different, yes. Sometimes we shriek. But that’s not the kind of fear that incapacitates any of us. It’s the dread of loss, of sinking unsupported into a world that’s insufficient, that’s inhospitable to us that can paralyze and start us projecting our boggarts into the corners, our hungry bears and Voldemorts. 

When I was a year younger than you are now, on one of my surgical trips to the hospital, I had a terrible fright. I was in traction, awaiting surgery, immobilized in my high, barred bed, watching a television hung from the wall opposite me. This was before they started outfitting pediatric beds with remote controls, so I was left to watch whatever the nurse had put on for me, at least until the next nurse came around. The Friday Night Flick, or whatever it was called, happened to be Vincent Price’s 1961 adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum. The final scene is of a person accidentally left to die in a torture chamber being walled up, helplessly gagged and locked into an Iron Maiden. Through a small, barred grill you can see the pleading, hopeless, horrified eyes. To my small self it was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen, the most terrible I could possibly imagine. It frightened me, and then it haunted me for years.

Of course, whenever I told the story of being terrified by that scene to adults, they clucked their tongues and said something stern about the inattentive nurse who had let a six-year old watch something so inappropriate for me. My mother didn’t approve of TV or movies to begin with, and only grudgingly conceded they helped the boredom of long stays in the hospital. Letting me watch something like a Vincent Price movie was just a sin, a literal sin, as far as she was concerned. 

I retold the story with increasing relish as I grew. I often emphasized how my terror had caused me to wrench in my traction, causing me considerable pain, and how the face in the iron maiden was a ghastly shade of green. Once, a girlfriend I was telling this to pointed out to me that I had said it was a black-&-white TV. So it was, I realized. I must have imagined that sickening shade of green. I put it down to how upsetting, indeed nauseating, the scene had seemed to me.

It was decades before something else occurred to me. I hadn’t been scared just because of the movie on TV. I was already scared because I was in the hospital. I was scared of surgery. Back then all hospital wards, even pediatric wards, were the same creepy shade of sickly green that continued around the halls, in the color of the scrubs, and into the Operating Room.  I had been frightened of surgery since I was four, not because of the cutting, the stitches, or the pain, but because I had a grim memory of the first time a stranger held the awful black rubber mask over my face and ordered me to breathe deeply. You see?

Today, I would probably still say that the nurse was a bit negligent who left me with that particular movie on the TV. But I no longer think that she in any way harmed me. In fact, I think that scene may have helped my fears overall. I was a small child caught in a miasma of distressing experiences that were out of my control, unclear, and alarming to me. That scene’s close-up of the wide eyes trapped behind the iron lid gave me a focal point, a single sum and substitute for all the real things I was afraid of—an image, most importantly, of something that I knew was unreal, was not happening to me, and likely never would happen to me. Neither will Lord Voldemort will ever be lurking in an empty hall for you, which is why he’s a good scare for you to seize upon, however inappropriate he may seem for a child of seven to be considering, and even if just reading about him lurking can still make you jump a little, years from now, at the thought of a half-empty house.