The Origins of My Fear
They say that the only two fears innate in human beings are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. The rest of our fears, we learn.
I first started learning to fear at three years old, when it was time for bed.
I had reoccurring nightmares that made bedtime a petrifying ordeal. As soon as my eyes would close and my consciousness slip away, the world of my imagination, once a welcomed repose, transformed into a place I was held hostage.
Instead of rest, I shivered with raw and trembling anticipation of what I would see.
Yellow cat eyes illuminated in the fog of night. My bedroom window was proppedd open and I looked out to see them, the cats, slinking around the sandbox, occasionally looking up at me as if to say, “This is just the beginning of your night.”
My three-year-old dream-self grasped the window frame and peered out at wild the cats prowling. I shuddered because even as they slinked and paced, they never stopped looking at me.
We were in Indonesia and although I don’t remember much about it, I do remember the fear that permeated my family’s experience there.
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My mom told me stories several years later of all the nights our house was broken into. She would be up nursing my newborn brother in a rocking chair while shadowed figures cut through our screens and let themselves in.
She told me how she held her breath while my father confronted the knife-wielding assailant who came to steal odds and ends: dishes, a bag or rice, forks and spoons.
We were white, which meant we were believed to be rich. I guess Indonesians had never heard of missionaries.
I suppose that even at that young age, I sensed my mother’s fear. Her thirty year-old self, newly married, newly maternal, vulnerable in a world that seemed so hostile to her help. Her vulnerability scared me. . Her quivering voice that said, “It’s going to be okay” gave me little reassurance because I knew she was lying. She had to.
Eventually, we moved back to the States, the nightmares stopped, and I grew up.
But when I think about what scares me the most, it’s still the same: the frailty of my mother, the strongest person I have ever known.
When she is unsteady or unsure, I feel myself blow away—a leaf at the mercy of the wind. I’m that three-year-old child, staring out the window in her dream at menacing cats with big, sulfur-colored eyes that only seem to grow wider.
I believe that we learn to fear just like we learn to love, from the people that represent fear and love to us.
Fear shapes things into the images of our mothers and fathers, our neighbors, our disapproving gods.
This is why we often fear who and what we love the most.
