My Fear is My Substance

Among the quirks of human nature are our latent fears.  We all have things that cause our hearts to race:  the doctor, taxes, bills, report cards, needles, lightning, to name a few.  But underneath are the things that we truly fear.  I am reminded of that great scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  “Snakes.  Why did it have to be snakes?”

My husband is the most staid person I know—totally unflappable in the face of confrontation, medical emergency, or truly bad news.  Oddly, he loves horror films to the point of obsession.  He considers paying $10.50 for the opportunity to be terrified a great way to spend an evening.  I have an opposing point of view.  I cannot willingly submit to contrived fear.  For me, it is a form of torture to sit quietly in an uncomfortable seat waiting for things to jump out at me.  If I were ever to be held at Guantanamo Bay on terrorist charges there would be no need to waterboard me.  Simply tie me down and force me to watch the Alien movies.  

In our little family we have a bizarre collection of things that instill fear.  My husband, for example, who is exceedingly tall for a human being, is both claustrophobic and afraid of heights.  He has the ability to perform surgery for eight hours at a stretch with his face goggled and masked, yet put him in a center seat on an airplane and he will be sweating and hyperventilating in a matter of seconds.  On more than one occasion he has had to leave the plane and stand in the jetway until pushback time.   He also has difficulty visiting the observation decks in tall buildings, such as Toronto, New York, and Chicago.  But it doesn’t have to be that extreme.  When his good friend was in residency in New York he lived in an apartment in Greenwich Village.  The building was oriented around a central atrium, with the apartments on all eight floors opening to interior catwalks.  When we visited, my poor husband hugged the wall with his eyes closed as we crept to our friend’s unit—his height placing his center of gravity at a disadvantageous relationship to the handrail.

My son used to be afraid of needles, which created a problem when a medication he took as a child required monthly blood tests.  He is now able to withstand incredible levels of pain—a side effect of playing hockey.  He once broke his hand when a hard check sent him face down on the ice, his glove sliding off his hand.  A kid skated over his hand, leaving his anatomy slightly displaced.  He didn’t make a sound when the orthopedist reset the bones.  My daughter, on the other hand, becomes a human fly at the sight of a needle.  Now nearly twenty years old, she quite literally will bounce off the walls when my husband brings home flu shots.  She does not even need to see the needle to decompensate before our eyes.  Yet strangely, she came home from her freshman year of college with a bizarre piercing through the cartilage on her ear—the result of a “team building exercise” with her fencing team.  For this horror, she apparently sat quietly and poised.

More than needles, Emily is afraid of lobsters.  Since an early age, she has been unable to function in a restaurant where lobsters swim live in a tank.  Even more threatening to her is when they are served up at the table in all their glorious redness, ready to be bathed in butter.  What appears as a delicacy to us it a giant bug to her.  I can recall one incident, when she was about 8, when my husband ordered a steamed lobster at our favorite restaurant in town.  She lined up three or four menus all around her plate, creating a barrier where she could eat her piece of salmon in solitude.  My husband—always the teaser—kept taking the carcass and pretending it was scaling the wall she had created.  It made such a scene I was embarrassed for them both!

When you are a mom, you become so accustomed to traumatic events that almost nothing scares you anymore.  I am certain that Mother Nature programs us to take charge in situations of nosebleeds, flu symptoms, medical procedures, and other trying life events.   By the time you have been bled, pooped, gagged, and vomited upon, what is left to be scared of?  And the territory is not just reserved for bodily fluids.  I have been called upon to rid the world of spiders, wasps, worms, snakes, and even a coyote.  At this point, there is nothing I am afraid of.

Except mice!

Mice are my Achilles heel.  I cannot believe that extent to which nice families invite rodents to be welcome guests in their homes, feathering their nests and feeding them like close relations.  The site of a mouse makes every nerve ending on my body come alive, charging me with electricity as if I had been struck by lightning.  

Our house is situated overlooking 114 acres of conservation land, preserved in perpetuity to look just as it did during the American Revolution.  It is a beautiful venue, creating a preserve for a rotating assortment of wildlife.  In the fifteen years we have been here we have seen coyotes, deer, wild turkeys, pheasants, foxes, and currently, a remarkable population of wild rabbits.  I love it because it is the opposite of a concrete jungle.  Its only downside is the opportunity to interact daily with wild creatures.  Thus, about once a year, a little mouse makes its way into our basement.  I only have to hear a little scratching in the hung ceiling down there that I make a quick call to Kenny—an intrepid exterminator that I keep on speed dial.

One day, as we were doing some redecorating work down in the basement, my husband reached up to open a highly placed cabinet above the small kitchen area.  Inside was a badly installed electrical socket, its box mounted inside the cabinet rather than buried in the wall.  Sticking straight out of the socket was a crispy fried mouse, his head disappearing into the plug holes while his legs and tails were splayed out, the image capturing the precise story of his execution.  Instantly, I began to scream—a blood-curdling scream that penetrated the walls of the house without stop.  The kids came flying down two flights of stairs, afraid to see what they would find in the basement that could justify the terror in my voice.  My daughter, always the dramatic one, thought that an axe murderer was in the house.  Even as the three of them surrounded me and ushered me away, I could not stop screaming.  I was non-responsive and my eyes were glazing over.  I could not utter a word; when I opened my mouth, all I could do was scream.

That’s why, a few weeks ago, I thought I was going to have a stroke right here at this computer where I write every day.  I was gazing into space, trying to find just the right word for something, when I realized that I was seeing something unfold before my eyes.  In my kitchen, in a crack between the dishwasher and the cabinet, I watched as a mouse materialized out of nothing.  It was like seeing a Tom and Jerry cartoon come to life.  The mouse was able to pull his entire six inch body through a space no larger than a sliver.  Then he came running toward me.

I jumped and ran and fell and stumbled.  Somehow, I ambled up the stairs and took cover in my son’s bedroom.  Desperate and whimpering, I tried to reach reliable Kenny, but as it was after five his business phone was switched off and he was already on the driving range.  The soonest he could come was 9 the next morning.  I hunkered down, feeling somewhat safe from an upstairs vantage point.  I called my husband, explaining in a whisper that I would not be preparing dinner that night.  My whole family laughed at me but I did not care.  I was not giving up my perch until Kenny arrived.

In fact, I spent the night in my son’s bed, too terrified to sleep in my own room, which is situated on the first floor, perilously close to the kitchen.  I thought again of people who invite mice and hamsters and guinea pigs to be pets.  And of those who procure live mice as food for their more exotic animals. Then I thought of my children, who should learn from my example yet were now laughing at me.  I am supposed to teach them how to brave the world, smart and bold yet appropriately cautious.  Then I thought of all the perils that they will face as adults today, things of which I was oblivious at their age.  Things of which we were all oblivious in those days.  That's when I became really scared.