Day 10 of 100 days of creativity

 From the Writers Block: Write about your greatest childhood fear...

I wasn't allowed to be afraid when I was a little kid. My younger brother was already a scaredy-cat. When violent, crashing thunderstorms rolled across the midwest, I would eventually make my way into my parent's room. My brother would have already claimed a spot in our parents' bed. I would quietly ask if I could also sleep in the bed and my mom would say, "No. I'm not going to have two kicking children in my bed. You can sleep on the floor." That was absolutely terrifying. Didn't my mother know that monsters came from under the bed? So I would be facing them, eye to eye by laying on the floor. No thank you. I could go back to my room and wait out the thunderstorm.

I was afraid of the ninjas under the basement stairs. As children of the 1970s, there were a lot of kung fu movies and TV shows. And there were definitely ninjas under the basement stairs. I hated when my mom would ask me to go get something from the freezer in the basement. I would punt to my little brother and inevitably get in trouble because neither of us had procured the frozen butter from the bowels of the basement. I managed to make it down and back without getting taken out by those ever-so-sneaking ninjas. But I knew it was just a matter of time. 

I wasn't afraid of the snakes that the cats sometimes brought into the house, not the bats that occasionally found their way through a screenless window. I wasn't afraid of the dark as one time I heard someone walking down our sidewalk in the middle of the night and I went down the stairs and sat on the landing waiting to see who it was. It scared the crap out of my dad to see his young daughter sitting in the dark waiting for who knows what.

I think the thing that I was actually afraid of was tornados. But if we peel back that onion a little more, I was actually afraid to be abandoned during a tornado. I was afraid that my family would leave me in the shower when a tornado came. We had to take showers in the summer as kids who used their wooded backyard as a playground daily. And sometimes I would resist because it was storming out. But my mother would insist that I take a shower and my compromise was to wait between the storms rolling through. And it was scary. It probably only happened a handful of times that I would start a shower before or after a storm. But I can still feel the fear. I wasn't afraid of the actual thunderstorms - my father and I would often hang out in the garage and watch them barrel though. They were powerful and fascinating. I loved them. But I feared that a tornado would come and that they would forget that I was in the shower. They would forget that I was there in the shower.

Isn't that everyone's fear? Isn't that the root of many psychoses? The fear of abandonment? 

Because I wasn't allowed to express fear, I'm actually pretty fearless. There are some things that I don't like (like really steep cliffs) but there are so many things that I say yes to and jump in first. I have to remember sometimes that I have fear and that I'm allowed to have it and express it.