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"...What does he mean by 'entertainment?'"

TERRIFIED

Some things that happen to you when you are a young child are hard to get over. There was a more disturbing side to my father’s personality. You wish you could forget, but the memories don’t go away. You can’t forget those kinds of things, especially when they happen to one so young.

I was terrified of my Dad at times.He enjoyed tickling us to the extreme. I remember being tickled until my stomach hurt from laughing. I’d beg him to stop, but he would not stop until he was ready to stop. He’d hold my foot between his arm and side and tickle it until the tickling became pure torture. My stomach would be throbbing when he’d finally stop. As a child. I was always very ticklish on the bottom of my feet, but I willed myself not to be. To this day, I am no longer ticklish on my feet.

I learned when I was very young not to show fear in front of my father. He seemed to get pleasure out of taunting my siblings and I. When we were quite young, we lived with his parents. My grandmother’s house was an old clapboard house. It had high ceilings, and was a total of four large rooms, and a large hall that was big enough for a small bedroom, a large bathroom, and two small kitchens. Nana and Granddaddy lived on one side and we lived on the other. My sister and I had twin beds and shared the spacious front bedroom. My brother was still very young and slept in a crib in the corner of the same room. The house was heated with gas space heaters and cooled with AC window units.

My Daddy seemed to derive great pleasure in turning the light off on my sister and I when we’d be sitting in the floor playing. He would hold the door where we couldn’t get out. We weren’t quite tall enough to reach the light switches. He would laugh thinking it was hilarious. After hearing us scream in terror for a few minutes, he’d finally relent and open the door and turn the light back on.

I was afraid of deep water. My father could swim like a fish. I remember he had a friend who had a cabin on Wind Creek. He loaned it to our family for the weekend. My Dad put a life jacket on me and threw me into the water and yelled as he threw me, “Sink or swim!” Because of being thrown, I sank, but the life jacket brought me right back up the top of the water. I had gotten strangled and was coughing to the point it felt like I was going to cough up a lung. It was horrifically painful. Is it any wonder that I don’t like water over my head? In spite of my father, I did learn to swim. My Mom never learned, and she wanted us to know how, so she signed us up for swimming lessons.

When I was young, Daddy worked for the State of Alabama as a forest patrolman. He drove a big green truck that carried a type of tractor on the back of it that would make fire breaks in the event of a forest fire. He also sat in a fire tower keeping a lookout for fires. The towers had stairs to reach the top and stood 100 feet in the air. My siblings and I were with him one day when he told us he had to go by the Beauregard fire tower to get something he had left behind. There was one in the Salem community also. He told my sister and brother to stay put at the bottom of the tower. He took me up several flights of the stairs and held me over the rail, kicking and screaming, telling me he was going to drop me. Is it any wonder I am afraid of height?

I don’t like crossing bridges over large bodies of water either. I don’t really remember a certain instance with a bridge other than us going to Pawley’s Island, SC on vacation every summer when I was growing up. Both of my parents had family in South Carolina, so that is where we spent our summer vacations. There were several bridges over large bodies of water in South Carolina. Some of them went quite high over the water. I was terrified of them, not really of the bridges themselves, but of the height of them as well as the fact that water was underneath, deep, dark water.

When my daughter was three years old, we moved into my husband’s parent’s old house after Hurricane Opal destroyed ours, an A-frame. They had just built them a new ranch house. The A-frame had two sets of stairs and they just were not able to handle the stairs anymore. It had a catfish pond behind it. One day, my daughter and I were walking around the pond. When we got to the dam at the back of the pond, I suddenly grabbed her and acted like I was going to throw her into the water. She was petrified and started crying. I immediately recognized my father’s behavior within myself. I quickly knelt to my knees and put my arms around her hugging her tightly. I told her I would never throw her into that water, that I was just playing; however, I promised her I would never play like that with her ever again, and I never have. The cycle was broken

#f ear #acrophobia #gephyrophobia #thalassophobia