Fear

One summer day, the kids and I were driving somewhere. Probably yet another birthday party in a warehouse filled with house-sized inflatable jumping things; the air thick with fake plastic smell. My mom called and said she had some big news but I couldn’t tell anyone. I told her I was in the car with the kids. I also reminded her that I am not a good secret-keeper. Of course we both knew she had to tell me then. “We’re taking the family on safari in Africa next summer.”

Oddly my instinctual, gut reaction was fear. This is odd because I lived in Cameroon for 3 years. Alone. I traveled alone to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Chad (well Chad was walking distance from my home in Cameroon). My children’s father is African. My children are half African. For years I often felt more African than American. Plus I am not a fearful person when it comes to travel, change, and new things. My fears are more internal—am I worthy? Will I do a good job? Will people like me? And even all of those fears I have managed to put in their place over the years. With the help of a good therapist, walking, yoga, reading, writing, I learned that I was born worthy, my worth does not come from good grades or performance reviews, and I no longer want or expect everyone to like me.

So what scared me? When my mom said, “We’re taking the family on safari in Africa,” an image appeared. A military checkpoint on a dirt road manned by armed, immature, underpaid, living-on-bribes, sporadic—and therefore dangerous—soldiers, or gendarmes as they are called in Cameroon. At that checkpoint, in front of those unpredictable gendarmes, are me and my two children. Sophie’s Choice.

Thankfully that image came and went as quick as a cheetah.  And the next second, I felt a burst of joy, luck, excitement. This is a scene in the life I dreamed for me and my children—traveling to other countries, eyes wide open to the world and all of its diversity, getting to peek into other ways of life, exploring lands that are still pure and natural, seeing elephants, lions, hippos, maybe a cheetah! It was all I could do to not tell my kids in the back seat. Of course, they could feel the prickly electric energy that this news generated in me. They know me best. It was something really juicy.

But later I came back to the fear. I wanted to unearth where it came from. I sat in my living room that night, staring at this wooden statue I got in Cameroon. It is a human figure with at least 30 nails hammered into it. It’s rusty and dirty because it has been in the earth many times. I was told its purpose was to resolve problems. Let’s say two community members had a dispute. They come together with the whole community, they dig up the statue, they discuss the problem, they hammer a nail in the statue to represent the problem, and they rebury it. Done. I never got to ask if it worked. I have done that over and over in my life—metaphorically, of course. Bury those problems with food, drink, work, self-loathing. It didn’t work for me. But here was the statue out of the earth, in my living room. So I meditated on one nail. There is my fear nail. Why wasn’t I scared to meet those wild gendarmes head-on in my twenties? But now in my much-wiser-forties, I am?

Here’s why. I have two vulnerable children to protect. It is scary—here in America, in Africa, anywhere. Will being scared make me a better parent? No, but I am human and I have to respect all my feelings, including fear. I cannot make my feelings just disappear and I cannot control them. But I cannot be controlled by them. I do not want fear to debilitate me and in turn my children. I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist thinker and writer. I’ve only just begun with one book, Peace Is Every Step. But I think if I were able to ask him what to do about fear, he would say, examine it, respect it as part of you, breathe into the fear, and smile as you breathe out.

In fact what Hanh does say is to sit with the fear. “We are afraid to bring into our conscious mind the feelings of pain that are buried in us, because they will make us suffer. But if we have been practicing breathing and smiling for some time, we will have developed the capacity to sit still and just observe our fears. As we keep in contact with our breathing and continue to smile, we can say, ‘Hello, Fear. There you are again.’” As my kids say, “Simple as a pimple.” Yeah right. 

My therapist suggested that I practice “sitting with my feelings.” I discovered that sitting undistracted is really freaking difficult, ugly, painful even. I made a “Sit With It” journal and tried to write about my feelings—just observe them and feel them rather than suppressing them, drowning them in food and drink, shopping and TV. The journal became just another distraction, another crutch. To really face my fears, I just have to sit and stare at them in my mind. And very simply (hopefully not pimply) acknowledge them. “Hello, Fear. There you are again.”

The worst thing about fear is that Fear is the master of spurring anxiety. Fear can make you imagine the wildest, most horrific scenes. Unfortunately horrific things do happen and people write about them in books and newspapers. People show them on TV and in movies. Something that is a one-in-a-billion possibility comes right into our living rooms, right into our hands in bed as we read. And then we are certain it can happen to us. That is fear.

Last year, the night before my kids and I were leaving Berlin to take an overnight train to France—during which it would just be the three of us—and we would have to take the Metro in Paris from one train station to another, I dreamt/imagined that my 5-year-old daughter got on the Metro and the doors closed before my son and I could get on. And she’s gone. Not dead. Worse—alone in a city where she doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have an address or phone number memorized, doesn’t have a clue how to get back to us, scared to death.

In the middle of the night, I imagine the worst—some creepy cartel of child enslavers gets her and she is forced to do … I can’t write it. But as the day dawned, I made myself imagine a positive version. A nice French woman with good English sees everything that happened and gets off with her at the next stop and calls the police. They get her back to us. Then I got up, found two slips of paper, wrote names and numbers, and folded them into my two children’s pants pockets.

When we got to the train station in Paris, we took a taxi to the next train station. Don’t worry—I wasn’t avoiding the Metro forever because of my fears—just for that day. And our taxi driver was so cheery, a young black French man who just fascinated my son. My son speaks French with his Cameroonian father. He’s often around black men speaking French who are African. But it didn’t really dawn on him that there were others in the world. He tried to speak a little French with the taxi driver and I beamed with pride.

After our stay near Marseille, we took the train to Paris again. This time we took the Metro to our hotel. And we had to change trains three times. While trudging our luggage through one of those long underground, bathroom-tiled corridor mazes with stairs up and down, a big man came up from behind and without a word, grabbed my daughter’s suitcase. He was helping us. He said nothing, but his smile put us at ease. Once on the train, after three of us held hands to cross over the threshold and get in together, we laughed so hard about the tall, young man carrying the little Barbie suitcase and not our big luggage. But I was really laughing at how large the fear was and then how small it got once we were on the train full of smiling Parisians who offered remarks about how beautiful my children were—in French and I understood perfectly.

In the end, fear did cause me to do some things differently. I did some practical things to diminish the fear—contact information in pockets, taking a taxi instead of the train, trusting a stranger to help a little, holding hands entering the train (not easy in the crowd with all that luggage). But fear did not stop me. And I remember the Metro ride as one of the highlights of the trip. We were laughing; I was thrilled that I understood the language unlike all the previous times I was in France since my French is of the African ilk and Parisians sounded like bubbling water to me; we were not separated; a woman asked me how old my twins were—ha ha ha you kooky French lady—my son is 9 and my daughter is 5—hardly twins at all but ah! La vie est belle, non? So the moment is painted into my mind like an intimate, slightly askew Toulouse Lautrec bar scene. Fear just giggled away.