The Nightmares I Can’t Stop
After a long work day kept me later than I anticipated, I came home to my nine year old still awake. It was only a bit of a surprise as the summer months afford us more “lively” hours during the extended summer days. My pre-teenage child who creatively, yet desperately grasps for ways to keep our attention in order to stay up and watch a few more moments of a movie or play the next level of a video game, seemed to be up to his typical charades. But tonight somehow the argumentative side faded away with a tenderness and sincerity that surprised me. Rather than asking for an extra helping of dessert, or some lemonade or soda right before bed, he sat on the couch in our living room separated from me by the pile of clean clothes that his mother had just folded. As he sunk in the comfortable couch just out of my reach he announced that he would like to ask a question. As he took a few moments to struggle and triangulate his words he ultimately put together a thought that had come, not as a shock, given recent events, but as an unexpected question just before bed. Admittedly, my impatience grew, because I was waiting for something like, “when can I learn to drive a car?” Or, can I play with my friends tomorrow?” But when the words came out a tender tone rose from his voice that landed in a place in my own heart that I had not foreseen would be touched this evening. It wasn’t a request for something to eat or drink before bed after all. It wasn’t an announcement of the next big thing he imagined saving up for. What he asked was thematically much different than what I expected. He asked “how many kids were killed in the recent shooting at a Uvalde elementary school?”
In our home, discussions about tragedy tend to be short lived, in part due to the age and attention of our children. It’s also difficult to know how to communicate tragedy in a way that is appropriate to their sensitivity. But as our oldest has grown in his understanding and capacity to think in terms of empathy for himself and others it became clear tonight that we would be having a different kind of conversation.
We answered his question about the number of children and teachers who were murdered. In the reflective manner that had already commanded our attention this evening, he declared that “it’s really sad for those kids to not be able to see their parents any more.” After a few more moments of reflecting along with him we asked him if these recent events impacted how he viewed going to school in the fall. He shared about how he was nervous and on a certain level frightened to think about being alone at school. Something as mundane as walking in the hallway or taking a bathroom break or the varied things kids do on their own in a school building have become anxiety provoking activities for him. He then softly told us that his biggest fear was that of being alone. This came as no surprise to both his mother and me because of the perpetual primal fear that he seems to experience routinely. But, for one of the first times his fear was not of a zombie or skeleton hiding under his bed. The fear he described was the fear of life as lived and suffered. I saw the source of his fear shift from the symbolic to what I understand as the “real” before my very eyes. As I observed this shift I was rocked to the core. The confident claim a parent has to offer their child about how the fantasy world can’t hurt them no longer applied. Because, you see, the only provision a parent can really make with certainty is in the realm of the fantastic. We can, in our modern age, reassure our child that zombies and skeletons can not kill their body in hopes that the psychological fear won’t cripple their imagination and help us sleep at night. But the zombies and skeletons have evolved.
His struggles to fall asleep at night and the night terrors that plagued him and our family in his early years grew into nightmares that still occur; if we’re lucky less than weekly. The night time excursions into his room are daunting even to the bravest explorer. Getting to my son before his cries wake the other children makes me forget to consider the treacherous landscapes of fabricated lego creations in the dark of midnight. Groggy and half asleep I snuggle up to a shaking frame of my oldest who has pulled the blankets over his entire body, wide awake with terror. When asked what he was dreaming about he often is afraid to speak about the dream because of the fear of reliving it even though I, his protector, am with him in his bed.
This evening he shared in his innocence a fear of being alone in an imaginary school setting. He told us that if he had the choice between being shot as the kids in Uvalde were, he would much rather be shot at home, because we would be able to say goodbye to each other. While I’m sure the painful experience of being shot weighs on his mind, it was the alone-ness that seemed to move him to tears. Not the tears of a tantrum for not getting his own way or being hurt by the punch of a sibling, but tears that express the depth of emotion that touched the core of his life experience. He stood up and walked over to his mother, buried his face in her neck and weeped. In these questions he crossed a bridge that linked the terror of the murders of Robb Elementary school children and teachers to his fear of being alone.
Previously, I would have attempted to calm the fears of my child by saying “it’s ok, dad’s here, and there's nothing to worry about.” But tonight these words stopped well short of my lips because in this moment I knew I could not say this. In my mind I understood that these words won’t always hold true. I have to wonder, did any of the parents of the murdered children sit in the beds of their terror stricken child in the middle of the night and comfort them the way I had my son and told them “it’s ok, daddy’s here?” Did they tell them that there’s nothing to be afraid of?
The feelings of distress and fear usurped the tenderness that had so pleasantly landed gently in my mind only moments ago. I grew fearful for him. I could not say with the fatherly reassurance he would be safe and that I could keep him safe. I couldn’t say with any confidence that this would not or could not happen to him. My impotence in the face of my child’s fear of these life experiences made me wish that zombies and skeletons might be the limit of his fear, because these were the things I could protect him from.
How does a parent strike the balance between honesty and protection of their child? How might I as a parent prepare my child for their life when I’m not there to protect them? Is it possible to do this without traumatizing my child in the process? Are we crossing into the moment that my choice to try living above fear is lunacy? Is this the hope of unfounded optimism at best and a naive abuse to my child’s future that I begrudgingly share with him how he should pretend to be dead in order to save himself should an armed vigilante threaten his life?
Oh, how the fear of death and violence around every corner has sustained the core narrative in my own mind. Even as someone who has made the conscious decision to not think and live that way, I’m still, in these moments, haunted by the contradiction between what I believe consciously and what frightens me in the middle of the night. It makes me wonder, is this fear that which unifies us? The fear that all we have will be taken away? Is the response to “arm up” coming from the same shared nightmarish core belief?
The numbers may be correct in that the risk of death by shooting at school is still in his favor. But when he wakes in the middle of the night calling out for me with these new images playing over in both our minds I’m reminded that we must concern ourselves not only with the loss of life taken by weapons designed to kill humans, but we must also concern ourselves with the impact these traumatic experiences have on our children and their families. We all have a choice; to use our power, to use our rights to perpetuate trauma stories that recycle the traumatic experience. Or we have an opportunity to use our power and freedom to work toward writing a different story.
— Andy Barchus
