Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "trackback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+trackback" bit from the end of the URL.
Foxes
When I was about four years old we went to some sort of fair or carnival, and my parents made sure to take me to an area where there were some animals in cages, including foxes. They did this because they were convinced I was terrified of foxes. I felt embarrassed and guilty, because I wasn't really terrified of foxes, but they probably interpreted that as being embarrassed because foxes turned out to be little and not scary.
The reason my parents believed I was terrified of foxes was because I used to sometimes start screaming in the middle of the night. After waking me up, they WOULD NOT leave me alone until I told them what I had been dreaming about. So on top of being terrified in my sleep, I was interrogated and bullied when I woke up. At night. In the dark.
I assume there was some belief that talking about bad dreams would de-fuse them. The problem was, I don't think there were usually dreams involved. I suspect, looking back, that the problem was night terrors rather than nightmares. Certainly, I rarely remembered anything that I was capable of explaining, though expecting a 3-year old to articulate something as vague as a dream, in the middle of the night, after being terrified, doesn't make a lot of sense in any case.
But "I don't remember" was not an acceptable answer.
On one of the rare occasions when I did remember part of a dream, there were foxes in it. Which my parents jumped on as the explanation for what had frightened me without listening to the whole dream. "Foxes" was an acceptable reason for screaming in my sleep
So from then on, whenever they asked what I had been dreaming about that made me scream, I said, "Foxes." I didn't really mean "Foxes". I meant "Go away and leave me alone".
I think this is when I began to be skeptical about the ability and willingness of adults to deal with unpleasant things. (A skepticism that was thoroughly validated in later years.)
They even got the one dream that really included foxes backwards. I seem to recall the foxes were allies or bystanders in that one. They were not the scary part.
And later, when my parents thought they were promising to protect me from the "foxes", it was the "foxes" that were protecting me from my parents.
I do remember what I think is another dream from a few years later, where I was running away from something terrible along with some foxes (and possibly other animals) that had escaped from circus cages. I don't remember whether I let them out, but the foxes were definitely my friends in that dream. They waited for me at the bottom of a hill because they could run faster than I could. I woke up when I reached them, and I don't remember what we were running from: it wasn't just the circus, there was something chasing us.
I'm pretty sure I knew that foxes were small even before I saw those poor, caged foxes at the fair, because there were ladies who wore dead foxes to church. (That might be a later memory, but it seems to be from the church that matches the house where I was dealing with the night terrors.) If I had ever been really afraid of foxes, it might have been because of those dead ones looking at me at church, not the live ones I had never really seen, being in the city.
I remember when I first saw a picture of a mink stole (and knew what it was) I was very surprised that it didn't have the heads and feet and stuff. Fur pieces were supposed to have the heads.
Looking back, the weirdest thing about all this is the way I was so absolutely desperate to be left alone after I woke up terrified. It seems wrong that a little kid waking up scared should not want to be with her parents.
It makes me a little worried about what I might not be able to remember, though I suppose those middle-of-the-night interrogations were bad enough to convince me I was better off alone.
I also wonder if my nervousness around dogs is an aftermath of this. The grownups around me expected me to be afraid of dogs, so I learned to be? My Aunt and Uncle, who lived downstairs (it was a 3-family house) had a boxer named Tina, who I don't remember one way or the other. I'm not entirely sure our lifespans overlapped.
I need to go over to the Boulder Zuni Fetish store (that's not what it is called, but it's what it is) and look at fox fetishes, I think.
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