I Don't Expect Anyone to Understand....

I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz all the way through, the flying monkeys scare the hell out of me!

You see I’m afraid of movies, and documentaries, and the darkness.

No, not the screaming, gasping, hair-on-fire, thrashing fear you exhibit when the jaws of giant, great white shark rips you to shreds while your drunken boyfriend sleeps in the sand. No, for me it’s the creeping, tingling, heart-clinching, nausea that begins in my toes, radiates through my being, and gets lodged in my soul.

I’m not sure when it started, but I’m damn sure I can’t be cured.

My earliest recollections go back to a little girl in Good Friday services wearing a “you’ll grow into it” green plaid school uniform. The church was pitch black and I thought it was the taste of incense and candles flavoring my deep breaths that made my tummy ache. Monsignor Scully gloried in the gore of the crucifixion and by retelling in detail each stripe of the soldiers whip or pummeling of the nails through the hands of our Lord, this sullen, angry priest found enormous power and a peculiar pleasure. We were commanded to look only at him and before our final genuflect the perspiring Monsignor would leave the altar, approaching each pew of kneeling children.

“God’s fury will be swift,” he warned, and we better each feel the pain and suffering to truly be saved from Hell’s flames. A six-year old Donna felt the anger and the pain, but it was towards the priest that wanted me to fear my creator, not the Roman soldiers.

“So Donna, have you seen The Passion of the Christ?” a self-anointed, self-appointed, soul-savers would ask years later, “it tells the real story.”

“No, a priest in my elementary school spoiled the ending for me, so I’ll just read the book.”

For the next 40 plus years, I’ve accepted that the fear of human darkness portrayed in movies has affected my life and annoyed my loved ones. I’m a movie party-pooper and I no longer apologize for my panic. I can’t stomach the shoot-em-up, blow-them-up, take-em-down, torture, disembowel, real-life, adventure-genre, violence laden flicks, and I’m often chastised by friends and family about all the fun times I’m missing.

I’ve given in a few times for history and Husband’s sake.

The last time I followed the yellow brick road to the local cinema was to see Cold Mountain with my gullible mate of 35 years. “Come on Wife, I swear, the guys in my Promise Keeper’s prayer group said that it’s a Civil War love story. Please? It will be fun!” he promised.

A promise he would not keep!

If you haven’t seen Cold Mountain, I don’t want to ruin your fun, just know the theater should have provided airsickness bags for those of us that find human –on- human cruelty in the name of patriotism, nauseating. And if Husband or my children or friends dare to remind me again, “It’s just a movie! Geez! It’s a great way to study history. They’re acting for Christ’s sake!” I might slap someone’s mother’s hands between the logs of a split rail fence, and crush them till she wails her tonsils out…in a Civil War love story sorta way!

It’s not that I live in a Fiddler on the Roof stupor thinking life revolves around Papa talking about tradition while his brethren are chased from village to village, singing catchy tunes. And yes, that is the standing joke, loosely rooted in truth, when anyone is asked about the only movie Donna will watch. I realize there are far more significant Jewish narratives memorialized on the silver screen, but I’m incapable of watching them. I’ve never seen Schindler's List because for me the visual brutality illuminates only a fear of the horrific failings of humanity, rather than a faith in the nobility of human resilience. So I view the Holocaust through the words of Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, and vow to use it as my own personal gyroscope in times of what feels like unnoticed acts of prejudice or indifference. Yearly, I open his book, and enter the childhood of this Transylvanian Jew. I listen closely to his anguish. My mind’s eye sees the face of his mother and little sister being led to their murder. I hear a dying father calling his son’s name only moments before Buchenwald devours another soul, and for the first time, having buried my own father, I feel the consuming empathy of a parent’s death.

When I close the thin paperback, until we meet again next year, the flame of purpose and responsibility illuminates my flaws and Elie Wiesel’s warning “If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices,” is mine to spread.

I don’t expect anyone to understand my fears or even try to make sense of them. It’s not like I haven’t looked in the mirror, searched for an herbal cure, or a local twelve step program. ”Hi, I’m Donna and I’m powerless over my fear of most movies, and nature documentaries where things get killed, and the darkness.”

One thing I know for certain is that desensitizing doesn’t help. Raising a house filled with testosterone, violence and chaos were often on the menu. When the boys were young it was live, not Memorex, and usually ended with someone in time-out and someone with an ice bag. Given that pre-teens travel in packs, our house was the preferred hunting ground and watering hole, so they unhappily abided by my movie rules in exchange for limitless Latin food and late night video game contests. But once they could buy their own DVD’s or pay for their own TV sets, my control was terminated and the Terminator entered my home. Why do most Animal Planet specials on God’s darling, furry friends end in a bloodbath and me screeching, “Change that! The dun dun-dun dun music means something’s dying soon….put it on ESPN!”

“Come on Mom!” they would fuss, “It’s reality. It’s the cycle of life! It’s just getting good too…the starving lion finally found the baby gazelles. You don’t want the lion to go hungry do you?”

“If I walk in the family room and catch a glimpse of one tuft of flying gazelle fur, you and Mr. Lion will both be foraging in the forest for food!”

“MOM! How could you work and teach about domestic violence for all those years? You were great at it! Remember the story of that lady being hurt with the tire iron? That was worse than this show and you weren’t scared.”

He was correct, but still watching ESPN.

Ms. Barbara taught me about domestic violence on my first day in shelter. A power outage wasn’t part of my training to work in the largest domestic violence shelter in Florida, nor was Ms. Barbara. But there we stood back-to-back in the tiny, humid, powerless laundry room. My brain was occupied with the women, the children, the co-workers, and the task of folding the laundry, and was not alert to the lady standing behind me. When I stepped back, laundry basket in hand, I bumped into a startled stranger.


At first I thought it was the darkness that heightened her terrified reaction, but when she turned to apologize for her scream, I knew better.


Thinking my eyes were playing tricks, pupils confused by the blinking, emergency strobe lights I stared intently. But as the creeping, tingling, heart-clinching, nausea beginning in my toes and radiating through my being commenced, I knew Ms. Barbara was really standing in front of me, tears in her eyes, with her nose and cheeks and lips ravaged by years of physical abuse. A pencil sized hole, weeping fluids from where her chin once was.

“Maam, my name is Donna, and I work with the children, but if you need anything I’ll help you,” I forced myself to say calmly, “and I’m so sorry you were hurt, but I’m so glad you’re here and safe.”

Inches apart in that musty room, looking into each other’s eyes she said, “Ms. Donna, I was more afraid of leaving him, than I was of living the rest of my life looking this way. Thank you for wanting me to be safe.”

No, I’ve never seen The Burning Bed, but I’m familiar with the topic.

You see I’m afraid of movies, and documentaries, and the darkness.

I’m not sure when it started, but I’m damn sure I can’t be cured.