Fear

Might we have something to fear beyond fear itself? I fear little now, but more intensely, primarily for the welfare of my children. I saw the writer John Irving on TV once talking about how having children made him more acutely aware that bad things happen in the world. Indeed.
Children themselves fear, with uncomplicated purity. My son has run from a room when Bruce the shark has appeared in "Finding Nemo." Simple. I'm getting the fuck out of here because I'm scared. Same thing with most animals, like my German shepherd. Her father, for example, scares her, so she tries to get away. If a fish perceives that it is about to be eaten by another fish, it tries to split. No posturing. No reasoning. No need to persuade themselves that they must confront that fear.
I've been concerned for my safety at times since having children, and I've tried to act prudently, but I haven't been scared. I suppose if God came to me, like as a burning bush or something, I might be scared. Certainly I would find it curious, that talking, burning bush. I'd even video it with my cellphone. Perhaps I'd be more inclined to be scared if a vengeful god appeared out of the heavens like in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," I think it was. Maybe Satan would scare me, especially all the fire and brimstone stuff. Seriously, if a red guy with a pitchfork and and horns and a tail suddenly appeared before my eyes, at the very least I'd be startled. I might very well even shit my pants. Who the fuck conjured that image of the devil, anyway?
Somewhere along the line, I seem to have lost the capacity to fear, except concerning the children, and in that respect I fear like I never have. I would wager that there exists a relationship between my lack of fear and disregard for myself. I didn't care if I hurt myself, so I wasn't scared. I embraced risk, in a destructive way. Drunken bike rides at midnight on busy highways. Walking on a six-inch ledge 30 feet above a river. Driving my truck up a steep embankment of the Mississippi River, unsure whether it would flip backward. Walking certain sections of New Orleans, against the earnest advice of locals. One of my therapists tried to get me to channel this into more creative and constructive risk taking, like skydiving (I might add here that heights do, in fact, scare me), but it never really took. Old habits die hard, and I was headed that way myself. When I fear for myself now, it's only in the context of those I would leave behind. I fear for how they would cope.
I used to fear. Reading "The Amityville Horror" scared the shit out of me. "The Exorcist" gave me the creeps. I sometimes feared getting in fights. But as the self-esteem diminished, so too did some of the fear. And as I started to question Catholicism, which seems to thrive on fear, the subjects that traditionally had frightened me no longer did. I once feared loss above all else, particularly the loss of my mother. As I lay awake at night awaiting her return home or as I pondered the potential pitfalls of her vacations with her friends, fear paralyzed me. One parent already had abandoned me. Fear and guilt commingled, and I feared that if I were to disappoint my mother, she too would leave me. She did nothing to allay such fears and in fact used them as leverage. She would say that she was running away, which of course elicited from me childhood entreaties that she not. Eventually, I feared that she would return. The fear of loss, however, influenced my relationships, sometimes to the point of destruction. Or I would shelter myself from loss by preemptively making a break with another person or by never getting involved in the first place.
I feared the unfamiliar despite the unsettling nature of the familiar. I never wanted to go back to school on Monday, let alone after the summer. I didn't want to go on trips with the soccer team, and when did, I was predisposed to cast aspersions on the families with which I would stay so that I could stay at the hotel. My mother caught me, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, reading a note she had written to my third-grade teacher. She started slapping my arms, but I had read most of it; she asked the teacher in this note why I never wanted to go to school. She probably never entertained the idea that the problem may have resided within me, and her. That proclivity to look for an external reason probably influenced my approach toward my own tumult; what, or who, on the outside had the balm to salve my wounds? Perhaps if she had asked more penetrating questions, we might have been able to address my difficulties earlier. But she lacked that capability, and awareness generally lagged behind these more enlightened times. My mother herself lived in perpetual fear, and the multiple locks on every door kept potential intruders, and reality, at bay, allowing my mother to exist in the world she created. Since having a stroke, her paranoia has only intensified, as if the incident removed what little capacity her brain had to balance out her irrational tendencies, the blood from the brain puncturing the rice-paper dam and allowing the full torrent of irrationality to pour forth.
I behaved well in school and brought home the sterling report cards. My third-grade teacher, the same one to whom my mother had written the purloined letter, blew a gasket when I punched a hole through my royal-blue turtleneck. Such uncharacteristic behavior for the child who wasn't. I was latchkey before the term existed, and my mother exclaimed over and over and over that I never lost a key. So I stole and I drank and I smoked marijuana and lived a life in parallel, Thomas the twin.
The most pivotal factor in overcoming fear consisted of my recognition that no greater horror awaited me that could surpass what I already had experienced. What on the outside possessed the capability to frighten me when the devils within had haunted me for my entire life? And why do my dreams keep me awake at night?

Copyright 2010 Thomas F. Hofmann