Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

fear

What I’m Not Going To Do

I was sitting at the table minding my own business in the pre-dawn hours of today when I saw a small shadowy creature dart along the wall I was facing.

I cursed, a lament, because it’s been almost two years since we’ve had an uninvited rodent in our home. (To be clear, we don’t invite them, either.)

My husband was at the gym and the kids hadn’t wakened yet, and we did not have work or school because of a teacher collaboration day, so there was no rush to get the day started. But this was not how I wanted to start the day. The creature’s presence in our home was the final bit of convincing I needed to go for a run, something I haven’t done in weeks, and as soon as my husband came home, I told him the mouse news (I’d already informed the children) and went out for my run.

As the morning progressed, I thought less and less of the mouse, even as I nagged my husband to set out the traps to resolve this disturbance to my peace. The kids and I did errands and came home to empty traps and went about our afternoon as if nothing was amiss.

If none of this sounds groundbreaking or earth-shattering, then you’ve probably not read any of my mouse-capades in the past. (Here’s another one.) I’ll be here when you get back if you want to read up on that.

See, in the past, I would have let the presence of a mouse in my house paralyze me. I would curl up in bed to avoid any chance of a rodent sighting. Or I’d demand we stay out of the house until the thing was caught. I would tiptoe through the kitchen or avoid the area where I’d last seen the mouse because surely it was hiding just waiting to run across my path.

Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash

This afternoon, I realized that it would come out when it was good and ready, and I could go about my day. (Also, as my son sits in the living room playing notes on his baritone this evening, I wonder why this mouse even wants to live in this house in the first place. It is noisy and busy. Find some other place to live!)

See, I decided that I wasn’t going to let a little mouse run my life.

—

This is how I’ve changed these past two years. Where I would avoid the things that overwhelm me, now I face them. (Not every time and certainly not perfectly.)

Take this anxiety journey I’m on. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I had a wake-up call and was given medication to help me through it, but right now, today, I’ve realized that I’m not going to let anxiety run my life. I’ll take the medicine when I need to, and I’ll take other appropriate measures when they’re necessary to manage my body’s responses to my circumstances. But anxiety’s not going to call the shots anymore.

Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash

Same with fear, shame, and the past.

Living with any of those things is no picnic, and each of them limits the decisions I make in my present life.

I know they aren’t going to disappear. (Except the mouse; it is going to wherever mice go when they die, as soon as it finds one of the traps.) I may never completely rid my life of anxiety, fear or shame, and I can’t undo the past, but they don’t have to be the starters on the field. 

They can sit on the sidelines and watch me live a full life.

—

Will this always work out perfectly? Not a chance.

But knowing it’s possible because I’ve experienced it is all the hope I need when the anxiety, fear or shame start to whisper their lies.

They’re not the boss of me.

And they’re not the boss of you, either.

Photo by David Werbrouck on Unsplash

I refuse to be held captive by something I can’t see, whether it’s a mouse scurrying in the shadows or something more sinister like shame casting a shadow on my days. There’s too much good work to do and too few days to do it, too many memories to make and too many ordinary days to live.

I hope you can hear the hope in this. It’s not meant to heap further shame. It’s meant to lead you into freedom. The kind that says, “There is something in the shadows but it’s not going to have control over me.”

Take your meds, sit with your fears, acknowledge your shame. 

In other words, set the mousetraps. 

AND

Live the life you mean to live.

What I don’t want to feel

I’m sitting on the porch as I write this, a cool and gentle breeze wrapping around the wrap-around porch, my kids yelling at each other in the driveway as they “play” (God bless summer). I am shaded from the sun and able to enjoy being outside without suffering the heat and humidity of the past week.

The porch is my favorite place. For writing. For reading. For sipping coffee in the morning. For taking a break in the afternoon when I’ve dedicated the morning to the housework that I hate.

But this sanctuary was violated. And now I have to fight the fear that I don’t want to feel.

—

On Friday morning, on our way out the door to catch the bus to downtown, the kids raised the alarm.

“Mom, where’s your bike?”

I turned to the spot on the porch by the door through which we enter the house and sure enough, my bicycle was missing. People describe it as a “sinking feeling” and it’s totally true. Like an anchor had been dropped into my stomach. We only had a few minutes before we needed to meet the bus, so I did a quick scan of the porch to see if anything else was missing.

It wasn’t.

I texted my husband, who leaves for work in the pre-dawn hours, to ask if he had seen it. I tried to rationalize the circumstances. Maybe, on a whim, he decided to load the bike in the van in the middle of the night and take it for a tune-up. Even as I write, this makes no sense, but it was a much more desirable scenario than what had actually happened.

My bicycle had been stolen.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

We went about our day with friends and my husband assured me he had not seen the bicycle and could not remember if it was there when he left for work or not. He encouraged me to file a police report, which I vowed to do later in the day. It was not a storm cloud over our day, more like a slight overcast. As we lunched with friends and hung out in the city, my mind kept returning to the porch and the feeling that we were not safe and neither was our stuff.

I wanted to beat myself up for not having a lock on the bike, for not paying closer to attention to details. I tried to laugh it off–it’s taken four years of living in this place for us to have something stolen, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before now! I wanted to believe the best about someone. Maybe they needed it for work or to get groceries or some other worthy reason.

I visited all of these emotions because of the one thing I don’t want to be: afraid.

—

As we drove home later that day, I found my eyes drawn to anyone on a bicycle. To the sides of the road where it might be lying abandoned. The police officer who filed the report said I should drive through the neighborhoods and look for it in someone’s yard. His first point of blame was the kids from the nearby apartments. (The same kids who last year were drawn to our garden and its bounty of food.)

Now I am eyeing my neighbors with suspicion. Every person who walks past our house is a suspect. I am harboring anger that someone would be so bold as to walk up to our porch and practically into our house to take something that does not belong to them.

I AM afraid. Afraid that someone has been watching our comings and goings. That someone knows when we sleep and when we rise. I am afraid they will come back and take something else or that I will accidentally catch someone in the act of thieving and someone will come to harm because of it.

Most of all, though, I am afraid of being afraid. I know what happens when fear is in control. I circle the wagons, build the walls around my heart, and refuse to trust my fellow man. I look at people not like me with suspicion. I fuel the stereotypes instead of fight them. I assume the worst in people. I adopt a posture of protection.

—

Yesterday, on our way home from a short hike through a beautiful woods in the middle of town, I was scanning the neighborhood again when I caught a glimpse of handlebars in a grassy area next to a sidewalk.

“There’s a bike over there!” I yelled. We pulled into our driveway and my husband walked the short distance to investigate. The kids wanted to go with him but we told them to stay put so they watched from the porch. A minute or two later, my husband returned with my bike on his shoulders. The back wheel was bent and dented, rendering the bike useless to whomever had taken it, I guess.

I let slip a word I try not to say in front of my kids then apologized. I left a message for the police officer with whom I had filed the report and I wondered if the insurance claim would be necessary after all. As I sat on the porch that afternoon, my mind found some dark places. I mentally called the “kids” who had taken my bike all kinds of names, the most mild of which was “punks.” I imagined encountering them in person and being angry, yelling at them for their lack of disrespect for someone else’s property.

I am furious that I now have to fix something that I didn’t even break.

I wondered how you bend the back tire without the rest of the bike being damaged. My dad suggested that someone was jumping it off of something high and landing hard. This, too, puts me in a rage. They broke my bike FOR FUN and will probably never have to pay the consequences for it.

Life is not fair.

—

It is not wrong to want to feel safe. Or be safe. It is wrong to worship safety or let the pursuit of safety be our primary aim in life. Guaranteed safety is unachievable. That might be frightening or it might be liberating.

A few days before my bike was stolen, I wrote a blog post about how terrible and wonderful the world can be. I almost laughed at the timing of the theft because now I had more life experience on which to draw. The same day my bicycle was taken and my sense of safety threatened, the kids and I had lunch with friends from out-of-town, took a food tour with more friends, and spent an evening poolside with yet a third set of friends. Our day was full of goodness with a blip of unpleasantness.

There was a time when the one “bad” part of the day would have ruined the rest of it for me. I could decide not to sit on my porch anymore because the idea of someone invading it is too unsettling. I could decide to lock up everything we own, to never leave the house anymore, to get a security system or leave the porch light on all night every night. I could choose all sorts of reactions to this event.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Before we found the bike, I had resolved to be tender about the whole thing, taking each next step as it came: police report, insurance claim, vigilance. I was surprised by how easy it was to throw all of those feelings aside when the resolution was not to my liking. Sure, we got my bike back, but it’s broken and for what? It is almost natural, these feelings of anger and hatred toward some person or people I don’t know who have wronged me.

This, too, I must fight with everything I have.

I still need to feel the disappointment of putting a family bike ride on hold. And I can be angry and upset about the condition of my bike. But I must keep my heart open because it is the way I want to live.

Fear is like a weed that wants to overtake the garden of my soul and I will yank it out again and again until it knows it is not welcome here. I could say the same for the kind of anger that leads to meanness or hatred.

These emotions will not be the boss of me any more than safety will be my ultimate goal.

I am choosing to love despite this small inconvenience.

It is not and will not be easy.

But it will be good.

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