How I got Goofy (pretty far back)

As children, when something went wrong, we tended to believe that there was something wrong with us  When I read this sentence, by Louise Hay, during the one daily ritual I allow myself (going through my email and posting on Facebook—where the Heal Your Life page I subscribe to appears and inspires me every time I read it) I knew what I’d write about today.

As children, there is something amiss in our lives (because we are observers of the world around us and perpetual sponges, soaking up things we are too young to process correctly) most of the time.  When I was a kid, television—color television—was the newest thing on the planet, and the new, 24” console Zenith my parents proudly purchased seemed to be on 24/7.  And much of what squawked forth portended of things no kid wanted to hear: threats of war, missiles in Cuba, Nikita Khruschev and the Russians.  Headlines spewed whatever had happened locally that day—a man shooting his wife;  three children suffocating to death in a burning home; 47 killed in the plane that went down over Plainfield—and then it all got re-hashed at the dinner table, when my mother asked my dad, “Did you hear about . . . ?”  So here lay the set-up from outside that instilled the fear in me, but lots of stuff happened under our roof as well.

I must interject at this point that my childhood is split into two parts: before my mother died, when I was ten, and after.  This took place during the former.  My mother had a brother, who scared the crap out of me, for as far back as I can remember.   He was her only sibling, so they were close.  And I think he had connections to some groups of ill-repute.  Violence in his household was as common as sneezing.  He had a game he used to play with his eight year old son, to show everyone how “brave the kid is.”  It went something like this:  He’d have my cousin sit across from him at a table and open handedly hit him across the face.  It would start tenderly—like a loving pat—but then it would get harder and harder, and I’d watch my uncle’s wind up get more intense, while my cousin sat there, stone-faced, without flinching.  I sat there, too stunned to move, wanting to run but also worried my cousin would simply fall over dead at any second.  Ultimately, my mother would tell him to stop--and he would--but even then, I’d wonder how these people could do something so fucked up.

Can you feel my internal fear raging at this point?  I wonder if these episodes might have inspired the recurring dreams of the boogie man in our basement, who’d come out of the closet, look me in the eye, and start to walk in my direction. At that point, everyone else disappeared, and everything went slo-mo.  As I attempted to run up the stairs (the same ones I’d go all the way back down, if my dad helped me), my legs would go numb, and I’d freeze in place, as I watched his hand get closer to my ankle.  Then I’d wake up drenched--heart pounding and ears ringing--and run to my parents room, where I’d climb into their bed and snuggle between them, until my dad’s snoring scared me almost as much as the dream had.

By the time I turned six, the world—both inside and out—had contaminated me.  And what was wrong with the world was wrong with me:  I had become toxically fearful.