When I was six years old, my family moved into the house that they still own today. Built about 1900, the two-story, white stucco home had once been an elegant residence in the most desirable part of town. However, at some point, a previous owner had converted it into a two-flat, which left it with some rather strange features, including an upstairs bedroom that had a kitchen sink and an outside door that opened onto a drop of 10 or 12 feet because the external stairs to the apartment had been taken down.
The house also had other remnants of its long history, including an oil tank buried in the back yard, a coal bin in the basement, and a cement block in the side yard whose purpose we never figured out. In the dining room was a fireplace we couldn't use because the chimney was crumbling and blocked, but which captured my imagination because just below the mantel was a loose brick that could be removed and which I imagined had been used as a cache for an important key. The basement had walls of slightly crumbly sandstone, and the attic could only be reached by a ladder so I never, ever saw it in the 16 years I lived there.
As a child, I viewed the house as a place of mystery because of all its strange features, and I became convinced that somewhere within its walls was a secret staircase. (I loved Nancy Drew as a child—can you tell?) Sometime in my teens, I began to have a recurring dream that came back again and again until I reached my late twenties. In that dream, I found the secret staircase and climbed it to find a hidden room somewhere at the top of the house. Once I discovered this room, I realized that all I need to do was move into that room and live there, and I would be happy. Only as an adult who had gone through several years of therapy did I finally realize the deeper meaning of the dream: the hidden room was all the emotion I felt I had to hide, and I would not be happy until I could stop repressing it and express it openly.
But as a child, I didn't understand the message my subconscious was trying to tell me. I knew only that I felt trapped in an unhappy life. My family was very emotionally repressive toward us children. Because of her own damage, my mother's emotions dominated everything, and the rest of us were expected to deny our own feelings in order to cater to hers. One of my mother's favorite stories to tell about my childhood was to describe what it was like to take me with her to the beauty parlor when I was about three years old. While she was having a permanent put in her hair, I'd sit on the floor playing quietly. But if I did get rambunctious, all she would do is look at me crossly and I would stop whatever I was doing to displease her and burst into tears. She would close this story by saying proudly, "The other women were always amazed at how much control I had over you." As a child, I would hear this story and think what a good girl I was, but as an adult, I had a very different reaction. I began to wonder what kind of mother was proud of having so thoroughly cowed her child?
The emotional repression inflicted by my family was exacerbated by our church. I grew up in a Baptist church that filled me with a lot of guilt at a very young age. I remember clearly being taught the memory verse "There is none righteous, no not one" when I was only four years old, and I first answered an altar call when I was seven because the guest evangelist said that if we didn't accept Christ right then, we might die and go to hell. Somehow—whether it was the teaching of that particular church or my own selective hearing, I'll never know—I completely missed the messages of grace, forgiveness, and unconditional love, and I felt nonstop anxiety about my relationship with God. This only intensified my feelings of being trapped in misery.
However, the trapped feeling was not just based in emotional dynamics. Tomorrow, I will talk about some of the external circumstances that contributed to my sense of being trapped.
