Facing Fear - The Story About a Little Girl's Courage

How did you learn to overcome your fear? The question was asked of me by Kristin at breakfast of oatmeal and coffee.

Most of us spend our lives running away in fear. Our fear will cause us to do things that our conscience finds incongruous to who we are. We are most of the time being told to release our fear, to embrace love and walk away from fear. My grandmother would say that its easy to say but hard to do. And she is right. Life is like a mansion. Each room represents a challenge, a weakness and a triumph. Some rooms are scary to enter while others are scary to leave. For most of us, stepping into an unfamiliar room hidden by a scary door can be daunting. I was raised by my grandmother. This statement for many is as familiar as saying I was raised by the devil. She was anger and rage in physical form. I came to hear later on in life that she carried around a flask of rum in her pockets. She was only four feet eleven inches and a force of terror for my sisters and me. The eldest of four, my job was to bath and change my younger siblings, cook the meals, unless later when I started having my period and then I was unclean and must sit on my hands so I did not contaminate her food; sweep the yard and wash the dishes. We had moved from the wattle adobe house that my grandparents built and lived in for most of their married life to the new cinder block house with the concrete floors. But we did not have a kitchen as yet, just a lean-to made of corrugated zinc leaned up against long branches forming a makeshift kitchen. Dirty dishes were to be washed at the side of the house on a makeshift table made of mahogany planks from the floorboard of the old house.

On this occasion, dinner was served on my grandmother's special occasion china plates. They were all piled up on the uneven plank beside the yellow plastic bowl filled with warm water and dish soap. I set to washing the dishes, careful not to make a chip in them for fear of the consequences. Maybe I was concentrating too much on not breaking the plates too much. Maybe this made me careless, maybe the fates wanted to teach me a lesson. Maybe it was my grandfather showing up to torture me from the grave. Whatever it was, that day I learned the power of facing my fear. I set the last of the rinsed plates down on top of the others and something shifted. I stood helplessly and watched as the white chalk plate slid off the stack. It slid down the steep hill not breaking nor chipping in its rush to escape and landed at the bottom shattering into pieces. I stood in silence, fear poured out of my face in sweat, my heart rate increased and I listened for the angry sound of my grandmother rushing to punish me for breaking her plate.

Realizing that she was not yet aware of my folly, I had to make a decision. I could hide the evidence, because she had so many plates, she would not notice the plate missing for days or even weeks. I would have to find a place to hide the plate, which meant digging a deep hole to hide the broken pieces, that was too much work. I did not know how my grandmother would punish me. She could pick up a rock and throw it, she had a great aim. She could send me to cut a switch so she could beat me with it, maybe she would use my dead grandfather's thick leather belt which she is delighted to use saying that she was using Mass James on us. Body aching in fear, I climbed down the steep him, still hoping that when I reached it, the plate would magically be in tact. It was an eternity until I got to the plate and picked up the broken pieces of white in my hands. I climbed back up the hill. My body aching with the tension caused from fear of the perceived pain I was expecting to experience.

The broken pieces in my hand, I tenuously approached my grandmother. "Wha you want?" She asked. "I - I broke the plate." My heart threatened to leave me right there on the spot with the old woman, jump my chest and run away. "What?" "I broke the plate." She turned her eyes upon me in silence. It seemed like forever as she stared, her dark eyes like pools of tar in her face. My hands were sweating, I feared the plates slipping and she stared at me. Then she did the unexpected. She laughed. She laughed so hard that she was bounced on her seat. "Go on." She said. I stared at her stupefied. What, no punishment? "Gwan." She repeated. I did not have to be coaxed twice. I ran, still expecting a rock to hit me at the back of my head. I ran, wondering what had happened. I rationalized that she was impressed by my courage. I pondered the phenomenon for years. And searched through my consciousness to understand what had happened that day. What I came to realize was that my grandmother so shocked by my courage, uncharacteristic of an abused child, could not do anything. I faced my fear and was open to accept the consequences.

This shifted the course of my life. In that moment, I realized that facing my fear was a courageous thing to do. This is a part of my everyday practice. That does not mean that I exercise carelessness. That childhood experience amongst others made me more conscious of my actions and their consequences. This is the story I shared with Kristin at breakfast of Oatmeal and coffee.

By Sonia Haynes