When I first saw the painting, Christina, by Andrew Wyeth, I was not in love with it. I thought it dull, not abstract enough. A teen angst perception really. It was also extremely sad looking, eerie, as if the young girl in the painting was looking at the home she was molested in. It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties did I learn that the painting was a painting of a real girl, who lived in Tennessee and was paralyzed from the hips down. Her name was Christiana, and she lived on a farm and got around by doing the army crawl. Suddenly the painting I thought I hated became my most beloved.
My daughter told me she couldn’t go to sleep because she kept having scary dreams. I have to remind myself that she is a child, not to be harsh with her, and sound assured. I told her the wise words that were told to me by a stranger, a woman who came to our North Dakota townhouse to visit my mom or dad. She was drinking a beer in a brown glass bottle, laughing. Seeing my mom laughing with someone was so odd. She kept to herself normally, and didn’t laugh, cried mostly. There she was laughing and when my mom told me to go to bed and I said to her—imagine me, a eight-year-old standing in all honesty, scared of going to bed. This strange woman who made my mom happy turned to me and said some of the wisest words to me. My mom watched us, and she said, “You know I used to have scary dreams and then I realized that I could control them, I’d tell myself I was scared and change the dream.” I looked at her contemplating this power, this impossibility, and said, “Really?” “Yes really, now I control my dreams and when I’m scared, I tell myself to stop and not go there.” And, she was right.
Suddenly being terrified had a solution. I could choose not to be petrified, a matter of mind control.
Thus the first day of being in control of my own life
What this woman didn’t know, and accidentally assisted in its demise, was that I had terrible nightmares. Nightmares with mothers murdering fathers and going crazy (all in one dream, when I was four years old). Of devils in the dryer stepping out and tilting the floor towards them, and she’d pull herself up holding onto anything to prevent herself from sliding into him. Of cars locking her in and driving her away telling her she’ll never see her family again, to the persistent fear that something was coming up the stairs to get her. And once it did and changed it’s mind, haunting and scaring the living shit out of me. My childhood was full of fear of what was coming. In the sink house I cried myself to sleep because of the whatever was hiding in the crawlspace door in the hallway. My bed was in the hallway because there was an room mother said we were never allowed in, not to play, not anything. It was haunted and unsafe. In my teens I learned that the two-story rental house was on a sinkhole, really it was slowly sinking. That strange North Dakota land was swallowing it at an inch a year. As a result, there weren’t three bedrooms and somehow I lost the coin toss, and it was me who would put my twin bed was set inside in a hallway nook. My parents jazzing the idea up, like it was a cool big girl spot. It was just wide enough to place my bed and two of three feet of room between it and the white wall. I had no place to put my things, just me, the twin bed on its metal frame on top a red shag carpet, beneath a wood framed window—left to deal with being the nearest most vulnerable person to the haunted room and the crawlspace mini door that had some strange baby crib dismantled against the wall. Dad said it was someone’s; someone left it there. This was a scary thing for me—someone else’s things.
