Spin Me I Pulsate.

• A tale of a Halloween past, either from your own childhood or from your experience as a parent;
• A “ghost story”, either real or sprung from your imagination;
  
• Any time in your life when you were frightened out of your skull.

Personally, having a little trouble with this one. I like halloween, but it's not like I have some love affair with it. Most Halloweens for me have been pedestrian, and rather like the prom. All hype, and very little good candy. Just those icky "kisses" that stick to your teeth and cause things to rot.

And I've never had any ghosts, although I wish I did. Apparently, my brother has a whole family of them, but I don't think that counts. Or my friend who had a milk pouring, poster ripping ghost, but i don't know the whole story since she hates to talk about it it seems.

Which left me with option 3.

Now, I don't scare easily, if at all. I'm a big girl, so it takes a LOT to frighten me. I remember only two instances of being actually terrified. The first occured during a particularily wonderful acid trip which ended in a sunrise I termed as "fuzzy peach". We were walking through a very dark, very creepy, known to contain rapists park, and almost to the end of the path when some jackass leaped out at us, likely after hearing the dorky LSD giggles that preceded us.

Ironically enough, the two GUYS I was with moved a hell of a lot faster than I did, and certainly didn't wait to see if I was ok.

Scare of my life number two was getting myself knocked up.

I never wanted kids, and didn't particularily like them. They smelled and did weird things to the carpets.

So to find those little pink lines on not one but three pregnancy tests caused the walls to shake and seize upon me as my heart struggled to find it's beat again. I attempted to will my uterus to abort abort!

Didn't work. And I was fucking petrified

I wasn't fit to be a mother, I didn't love things, I could barely take care of myself.

I worried that someone would break into our house constantly. I worried that something would happen to my husband. I worried I'd be fired. I saw boogiemen behind every door, in the corners, in my tap water, since we all know tap water is the root of all evil.

I was scared of every piece of food I put in my mouth. Well, almost. I wasn't scared of the veggie burgers from Burger King, which is a good thing since I ate them all the time. But I was scared of pain, I was scared of the kicked in the groin feeling of late pregnancy, i was scared of my suddenly incredible sex drive, and the resulting tired husband.

Mostly, I was scared that I wouldn't pick it up and be the adult I suddenly had to become before I was ready. I was scared to actually grow up. Having a child would mean that I would no longer be able to stay up all night playing the Sims; hell, I wouldn't be able to afford a computer to play the Sims with. I didn't want to start acting as a fully functioning adult-it was bad enough I got married at 20.

But that's the funny thing about being the woman. You don't have much of a choice. Even if you abort, or give it away, you are irrevocably altered by becoming 'the oven". Your breasts change, your hips move, your sense of self shifts so much that you wonder if they felt it in China. You are suddenly aware, vividly, that you are not an island alone.You are part of something bigger, and badder, than you ever dared imagine.

It's a wonder I even left the house really.

I was scared the day my water broke, and remember staring at my husband on our back porch, asking "Are we ready? is this it?" Two kids stood there, two scared stupid kids, and they never came home.

In their place came the adults we were scared to become. I miss that child sometimes, but the fear was the harbringer of something much different. The fear broke down the fences I had built, destroyed them really, which would have been the more frightening if it wasn't replaced with something wonderful.

Awe, and love. Which, in the long run, might actually be scarier than you think.

Labels: Blogging for Books, fear, halloween

Posted by thordora on Friday, October 06, 2006 at 12:50 p.m. | Permalink