Fire and Water

Fire and water were the main players in two events in my life, one of which, according to a Real Mental Health Professional, had a major impact on my mental health (if I sound skeptical, more on this later), and one of which felt much more traumatic than it sounds on paper.

Fire

I'm not sure how old I was, but this event is surely among my earlier memories. It probably comes after the memories of being held upside down and "walked" along the ceiling by my dad, since it entailed a lengthy recovery period for him during which he would not have been doing anything of the sort [which begs the question of why I remember so vividly those interactions with him and then nothing at all from the recovery period except stories of how he was fed ice cream in the hospital]. To be arbitrary, let's say I was three years old.

I was messing around in a little-kid way in the living room, doing little-kid stuff, when a ruckus burst out outside. I don't remember screams, exactly, but lots of commotion and yelling, and I was bundled up by my mom and conveyed to the car. I obviously was shoeless when the incident started, because at some point on the ride to the hospital it became clear that my shoes were on the wrong feet (vague memories of being told I would have to put my own shoes on). It's hard to say how much this played into my feelings of confusion and distress. Although I was surely pretty verbal at this point, having the ability to form lasting memories, I kept repeating "Mama" and something resembling "deuh-duh". I don't think this was meant to be "Daddy" or even "Dada," and, somewhat embarrassingly, I don't remember feeling worried about my dad, exactly, although it should have been obvious that he was hurt. I do remember being agitated, having some kind of unmet physical need (thirst? shoes on wrong feet? both?) that was being mostly ignored by my harried mother driving the van, and by my injured father in the passenger seat. Mostly I was puzzled and alarmed by the unusual situation and the stress of everyone around me, including my sister, who at 6-ish was old enough to realize what was going on, which was that my dad had severely burned himself trying to burn out a wasp nest with gasoline.

In the end his arms healed, with some scarring, and I never thought of the incident as anything that had directly affected me. Years later, in college, I decided in one of my more financially lucid moments that I should take advantage of the mental health coverage provided by my student insurance, and went to see a therapist. I don't remember exactly what I told her my problem was--my whole life has been a complex of low-ish-grade, hovering-around-the-clinical-threshold issues. Let's say I told her I was depressed. She immediately commenced digging around in my early life for some traumatic event that might explain my current issues. I tried to oblige but was at a loss until I hit on pay dirt: my dad was burned pretty badly when I was little! I felt like that fit the profile she was looking for, and she seemed satisfied with it as the hook on which to hang my problems. I'm not sure why I didn't bring up the at least as cogent fact that a year and a half before that I had been attacked (ineffectually, thanks to the fact that my sister was also there) by a never-identified stranger in my house (I'm also not sure why I never thought of him by the more dramatic term "home invader"), and since then had been having what I now realize amounted to post-traumatic stress disorder, suffering extreme anxiety and lashing out at my well-meaning family. But anyway, we settled on the early childhood parental injury theory, and I've always been a bit bemused by that choice. I also never went back to that therapist, full insurance coverage be damned.

Water

A few years ago we went on a very nice vacation to the Florida Keys, and decided to extend our stay when we were sent photos of icy landscapes at home. We felt very clever and borderline hedonistic in our decision, until we arrived home to find water flowing out from under the house like a waterfall because the pipes had frozen and burst. This had been going on for at least two days, resulting in about 2/3 of the house being flooded, with moisture seeping up a couple of feet into the interior walls.

Having never experienced a house-based disaster, I had never given much thought to how important home is, despite being someone who likes to spend time at home. I was taken aback by the intense feeling of bereavement as we drove away, as if on a vacation, to the insurance-underwritten hotel where we would stay until our house was livable again. Technically it turned out to be a happy ending: our insurance paid rather generously for the needed repairs and replacements, and we ended up making some badly needed improvements to our esthetically challenged house. But I'll never forget the feeling of loss and loneliness at having something happen to destroy home, even temporarily. Since then any story of people losing the place they live, from a middle-class coworker's home burning to an earthquake in some faraway impoverished country, hits much closer to home for me, to use a too-on-point expression.