The past has a way of protecting you. Sometimes for a long time. Until it’s way way in the past. Yesterday, I remembered suddenly the circumstances around my first panic attack. I used to think they started in high school. The doctors would ask: "When did you start having panic attacks?" I'd try to think back, but, caught in the grips of anxiety, it seemed like always would have been the most accurate reply.
Until yesterday, though, I thought I had it nailed down to my tough times in 10th grade. Those are the ones I remember best. Under siege by what ifs and terrorized by possibilities ranging from the very real to the really absurd, grappling with hour-long bouts that were very painful, and very physical, and made me certain that I was going completely out of my mind and could not take it another split second, the days when a minute seemed like three years and the thought of three years led to the next wave of terror.
But last week I remembered. I didn’t just remember; I was there. In the fourth seat of the first row from the door, Mr. Connor’s 6th grade science class, trying to pay attention even as I was fixated, as always, on his bald head and his wrestling coach walk, and the rumor I had heard from the other kids that his wife had just died.
His question to the class is what started this wave of panic, which ripped up my spine to flush my cheeks, which made me want to run from class to the bathroom where I could throw up. I was sure I would faint, and if I didn’t I was sure I would die. It was perhaps the hardest question I had ever been asked and is even still:
“What does your father do for a living?”
Followed by, “Let’s go around the room.”
And one by one, the answers came from the other kids, fast and furious, a restaurant manager, a construction worker, a teacher—like you Mr. Connor!—a writer, he works at Xerox, he delivers the mail, until he hit the row before mine. I turned around to Susan, who sat behind me. She lived on my street… one of the few who knew I didn’t have a father, that he was dead—“What do I SAY?” She shrugged her shoulders. “mmmm mm mmmm.”
As a kid, when your father dies before anyone else’s in what you know to be the entire world, that makes you really different. A freak. And in 1969, if he died of cancer, that made you a leper. I was about to become a leper if I didn’t think fast. Really fast.
And as he pointed at me, I said it. Well almost:
“My mother works.”
“Oh. ……………….. What does she do?”
“She shows apartments.”
And he moved on.
But I never did.
