A stately home adjacent to the park I walk every day had a new feature: giant images painted onto plywood signs were speared into the front lawn: Basketball! Unicorn head! The number 10! And my first thought was, Now predators know where and how to get that newly ten-year-old. Unicorns, basketball, small talk involving their recent birthday. The same instinct makes me unable to write my child’s name online (though I post his pictures and fashion parts of him into anecdotes). Which edges into magical thinking: if I conjure his name, I will also conjure Trouble. A golden key engraved with the family safe word and his social security number will fall, unnoticed, from my pocket. A cloud of crows will descend on our walk home from school and carry him off morsel by morsel. Arnold Friend, with his dyed hair and ill-fitting boots, will drive out of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” and pull alongside us in his spray painted jalopy. When we stop for gas my child will be mistaken for and taken as a girl.
Have I just written the equivalent of a 5-foot plywood sign? Do I know what sort of story we’re in? I do not. Can my ears pick between the approaching sounds? Siren, wing flap, boot on gravel? They cannot. Head full of static.
The world of myths and fairy tales is merciless, but the terms are often clear: heed prophets and dreams, heed animals, trees, and the wind; be generous, patient, keep your word; do not imagine that you, alone, can violate prohibitions with impunity. Unless, that is, the tale involves fate. Then, do or don’t, the ending will be the same.
Though I am at home in the water, my only nightmares of my son’s peril or death have been about drowning: I can’t keep my grip on him in the ocean. In a lake, he slips away from me and under. He floats face down and unseeing in the tub.
If I were a parent in a fairy tale or a Greek tragedy, I would have piled a cart with our belongings and moved to the center of a trade winds desert or high into arid mountains to insure my visions wouldn’t manifest. And in those tales, by keeping him from water, I would seal his death-by-drowning. Fate would satiate itself when we were at our most relaxed. Reaching an oasis, he would greedily plunge into a pool and never emerge. He’d sneak his first alcohol and fall nose-first and insensate into an urn of wine. A freak rainstorm would fill his open, snoring mouth.
I haven’t heeded the warning. Instead, I made sure he knows how to quasi-swim. He’s happy to jump in; he can tread water, can make half-hearted attempts at strokes. We seek out water cold enough to snatch our breath. When our lips turn blue, it’s almost time to get out.
On the far north Atlantic coast last summer, I finally told him: Should you fall in, you have to strip down to survive. I’ve rehearsed these procedures in my head many times but haven’t transferred them to him. If you fall into deep water, kick your shoes off first, then any bulky jacket or sweater. Otherwise, they will pull you down. Stay calm, conserve your energy, I say to a fantasy version of my child.
I wait too long to offer survival skills. A rebellion against my father who raised us as if we were in a disaster/horror movie and we would be the sole family to make it out alive. This, while it seemed like everyone else was living out the go-go 80s narrative in one of the world’s safest countries. He told my latchkey sister and me: “If you come home and the dog is dead, run!” And a film of my dog murdered on the family room rug looped in my mind for years. He warned that someone might wedge a toothpick into our door or car lock, so we’d be goners fumbling with our keys—Huh…won’t go in…what in the world…Let me just try one more time….—while the audience shouts, “It’s a trap, you idiot! Run!” We didn’t want to know, he’d say, what would happen if an adult got their hands on us. It’s true, I didn’t. But prompted by his warning, I scrambled to project prismatic horrors into the blank white cube of my mind. The things that terrified him became the things that terrified me. Though they made me a little afraid of and for him—that he believed harm was gestating in every person but himself, looking for a way out. I can’t then turn my son’s mind into a screening room for my parental fears: predators, crushing insecurity, dares he will leap to fulfill, narcissism, falls from great heights, addiction, a virus targeting his vital organs. There’s a delicate line between issuing warnings and ascribing fates.
I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse. I didn’t fear the apocalypse, I feared myself—getting caught in a moment of anger or doubt or selfishness or neglect, for which I’d be unable to atone. I sometimes think I burned through my lifetime’s vigilance in the first thirteen years. Burnt on Christianity’s imaginary, self-serving escape hatch. Fear trundles on now, without the vigilance.
A rack of pamphlets in the church vestibule held another fear, distilled into a tri-fold. The first panel depicted a man in a car pulling up beside a boy, all smiles. He offers the boy something, and panel two shows the car driving off, two heads in the front seat. In the final scene, the boy walks from the car with a black eye and busted lip, holding one arm close to his body, the driver’s face now a mask of menace. The un-pictured interlude in the second crease of the tri-fold might have been simply the beating this stranger had given the boy. But the boy’s face was shaded in and distorted with something I scoured the pamphlet to decode. The answer was that the last frame was saturated with shame, not just pain and fear. I didn’t quite understand the source of the shame, but, instead of asking someone, I visited the pamphlet in secret, carefully replacing it on the rack each time. Because the shame was contagious. This thing, I assumed, is the thief of words. It steals your face and the neurons behind your face.
I also puzzled over the fact that the victim was a boy. I didn’t know the statistics—that strangers and near-strangers kidnap girls around 74% of the time—but I’d already absorbed a hundred thousand inchoate messages that victimhood was the work of girls. (What did I know of boy fear?) Later incidents reinforced the idea that to be a girl was to be afraid most of the time, with irregular spikes into real or perceived mortal danger. I was maybe ten and with my best friend, waiting to be picked up from the YMCA where we took swimming lessons. Deep in our sticky, hopeful girlpod, we wandered the perimeter of the parking lot, which bordered a wooded lot with picnic tables. We saw but didn’t notice two men sitting on, not at, a table. We both heard one say to the other, “Let’s get them.” They moved fast and we did, too. Busted sneakers slapped across the pavement. The lobby of the YMCA was base and we were safe. We told no one.
We could be shamed for anything that brought our bodies into view. We could be shamed for making adults consider what might have happened or ask: Why us? It was a similar sort of reasoning that made me, in second grade, hide a hurt pinkie for weeks until a teacher noticed that I’d been holding my hand against my stomach. I felt undone by her noticing. I was a relatively safe child, physically safe. But it seemed to me safer to walk around with a secret broken finger clamped against my stomach than to let an adult see me.
Now I’m an adult in charge of someone else’s safety. Someone who has his own lush crop of fears. He has swathed himself in “protective equipment” since he was one and a half, drawn to the gloves, boots, jumpsuits, and helmets of dangerous professions. This morphed into warrior’s armor at age three, and he has armed himself with an ersatz sword every chance he’s had since then. But he’s on guard against things a sword can’t touch, and I find myself in the business of allaying fears, not stoking them: You have a near 0% chance of getting rabies in your lifetime. . . You will not sink in the Titanic unless you have a very precise time machine. . .You will not get the plague, unless you pet the wrong prairie dog or chipmunk. . . I can say this in exchange for calm, but if, while fixing breakfast weeks later, I happen to say “prairie dog,” there is the plague, scampering around on the kitchen counter. In his story of the world, you can’t name your fears without conjuring them. You should, instead, swaddle them in gauze and packing peanuts, tape them into a box, slip them deep into the shadows of the attic, and hope that you don’t wake to find them unboxed and lined up on your nightstand, watching you (fail to) sleep.
I would like to teach him to live in a different story, one about care and courage and invention. I find myself repeating, “Tell yourself a different story about ____.” But there is no safety in a story. Stories exist to endanger their characters, back them into unpleasant corners and extract payment for their release.
Perhaps better to live in a word horde than a story, then. Like the synonyms for safety all lined up on my nightstand:
Refuge Security Invulnerability Cover Defense Assurance Immunity Asylum Impregnability Shelter Inviolability Sanctuary
But half of these words make me feel the opposite of safe.
Security Defense Immunity Impregnability Invulnerability Inviolability
They bristle and flex. They don’t mind if they’re the last ones standing. They might depend on it.
Scratch those and we’re left with:
Refuge Asylum Cover Assurance Shelter Sanctuary
I feel my hackles droop and my pulse soften just reading those words. They’re like feathers that line a nest or velvet moss in a bower. If you find your safety behind an inviolable defense, how willing will you be to crack the door for someone knocking? If you make it to the hush of a refuge, though, you might try your best to deserve it; you might slip others into it, turn one velvety bower into a warren of bowers.
The meanings of words tend to migrate out from under them, sometimes even coming to mean their opposite--egregious, for example, and awful, nice, cleave, sanction, and enjoin. “Safety,” though, remained stable in English for over 500 years. Safety: freedom from danger, risk, or injury. It was, apparently, the perfect word no matter the morphing dangers the world offered. As the industrial revolution began in the mid-1800s, though, the term expanded as our dangers did: the loud ones—factories, cars, roller coasters, planes and the bombs that fall from them; and all of the quiet ones--seepage, stress, isolation. Safety valves, safety pins, safety net, the safety on a gun, the position on a football team, safety as a score against your own team. Most of the new terms describe a measure of protection built into an obvious danger. Many quickly became metaphors, many became new nouns: The safety valve is broken. There is no social safety net. We take safety very seriously. I’m a safety. Engage the safety. The safety is on, is off, is going in for the tackle.
The most recent definition has ingested the dichotomy: “the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury.” Safety is protection for and from yourself. We are not safe—there may be no sentence that more perfectly captures modern human existence. We feel uniquely threatened and we have learned to uniquely threaten, the balance shifting over millennia from We are not safe from to We are not safe for.
I think, perhaps, the dominant fear I held at five was misdirected but not mistaken: that harm is emanating from me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. Only now environmental collapse has been swapped in for the Christian apocalypse. It’s no longer imaginary, just slow and scattered, and largely happening to creatures who aren’t us, largely waiting for us at big round numbers: 2030, 2050, 2100. And most things I do don’t make us any safer. A middle class existence in one of the richest countries in the world is unsafe for that world. I can practice assiduously the three R’s, have a garden, look for seals of Sustainability, mostly walk or bike, but these busy little gestures are dwarfed by my American middle-class expectations for space and comfort and convenience and amusement and novelty and, yes, safety, from hundreds of real and imagined dangers. I suspect harm will continue emanating from us until we’re obliged to run for shelters—water distribution centers, post-electrical grid cooling centers, inland northern real estate. At which point it will be hard to imagine a bower that doesn’t turn into a bunker.
Meanwhile, there is a booming safety industry built around “The control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk.” In their terms, “risk creators,” regulators, and those at risk engage in an existential battle over the interpretation of “acceptable levels of risk.” But risk is spherical and we only seem to grab hold of a few vectors at a time. There are mandatory gloves and hairnets in the Volkswagen cafeteria, while cars with falsified emissions standards rolled out of factories that emit CO, CO2, Volatile Organic Compounds, and heavy metals, among other pollutants. If Taylor Energy Company in Louisiana is like most blue collar workplaces, there are signs on the break room walls that say, “We have gone ___ days without an injury,” while a collapsed offshore rig has leaked 300-700 gallons of crude into the Gulf each of those workplace safe days for the last 17 years.
You might, in other words, be a risk-creator inside a network of risk-creators. All humans are, at this point. I wish I had known this as a child, when I was verbally battened into a bunker to ward off dangers that never materialized. Which made the bunker mentality the true danger, the way it tried to make me fear the future more than I loved the present. Instead, in a recombination, I feared/fear myself in the present, assuming that I am a risk-creator in any given scenario, as a writer, a teacher, a middle-class white American, but none more so than as a parent. Which is the other reason I am, to him, a haphazard premonitor of dangers. I describe the usual suspects: cars, germs, head injury, cavities, anyone who wants to get you alone, who says, “Don’t tell your parents…”. I gesture at the big-ticket future fears, a little afraid that if I conjure them in too much detail, they might topple from his nightstand and crush him. But I am a danger, too, as an omnipresence he didn’t choose and can’t yet skirt. A fact about which he was clear-eyed in a recent conversation.
Him: I never get a choice in anything.
Me (steady and sincere, I think): Well, I’m not sure that’s accurate. We ask for your input a lot, don’t we?
Him: Yes, but only when you choose to!
A few years ago, on a walk to school following some small storm, I told him that some day he’d likely be angry with his father and me, not for the things that anger him today, but for things we can’t catch hold of now, the things we will only later realize were the dangers to character, happiness, and well-being. Things we did or didn’t do, things we couldn’t hear coming. It was probably too much. Not safe to pull the curtain back on a future in which children and parents sometimes turn into adversaries or strangers.
I think I understand why my father focused on home invasions and communist invasions and canning his own bitter tomato sauce. Too hard to see yourself as a risk-creator, too sad to look squarely at the fate you’re speeding toward with your fingers in your ears. I thought maybe if I understood myself to be a risk-creator, if I named the fears and worked on creating a bower instead of a bunker, I might buy us just a smidgeon of safety from the dangers ahead. But humans are not safe. And anyway, we won’t know what sort of story we’re in till it’s over.
Amy Benson is the author of two books: Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc Books, 2017), winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), chosen for Bread Loaf’s Bakeless Prize. She teaches writing at Rhodes College in Memphis.
Photo credit: Martino Pietropoli