Invisible Trap

CW: This story contains themes of emotional neglect, childhood trauma, mental health struggles, and unhealthy relationships. Reader discretion is advised.

The You Are Here sign and accompanying arrow was nowhere to be seen, but then neither was the map upon which it would have been situated. She wasn’t even looking for the map, but had she been, she’d have looked in all the wrong places. The confusion of that unborn search was not helped by the fact that it would never be clear whether the map was one of life’s paths or of her mind itself. Were these two maps? If they were, would they overlay each other in order to help the traveller find their way to a place of enlightenment?

Enlightenment in itself was a strange beast. Those who sought it were expecting a glorious and elusive animal. A unicorn of understanding. When all it was, was what the word said. A light. A small flame that flickered all the more brightly as the simplicity of truth hit home. All enlightenment was, was a way of seeing what had been there all along, and far from being a disappointment, it was a revelation that would change everything. Yet the change had been there all along, so it altered nothing in that very same moment. Just because a person has never cast eyes upon the ocean does not mean it is not there.

Her existence was an exercise in denial. But then that was no different to every other life. Denial is a necessary coping mechanism against the infinite. However, the denial in some is amplified. Pain can do this. Being hurt will call denial forth and a person will beg that denial to cast a spell upon more and more of the life external to them. Denial cannot do this, and so it does the next best thing. It casts it’s dark spell upon the person themselves. 

The spell seems like a blessing. Protection from the potential of infinite pain. A simple, mortal soul cannot comprehend the infinite, and there is a mess of unbearable pain in even imagining the fear itself. Fear stalks each and every one of us. Fear is a challenge that we must ultimately accept. The challenge of shining our light into the darkness of chaos and being ourselves at last.

And so Jane had been running away for as long as she could remember. She chose not to remember the sad absence of emotional unavailability that blighted her childhood. Her warring parents preoccupied with their unceasingly selfish battles. Unwilling to open up to her and relate to her. Never finding it within themselves to be there for her in a meaningful way. Parents in name only. Biological abnormalities spawning further abnormality. 

In her distancing herself from her failed childhood, Jane allowed herself no idea of what she was running from and then she allowed herself no conception of the running itself. She even denied the absence of coherent direction in her life. Instead she created false reassurance by throwing herself into a busyness that she then attributed her tired and weary state to. Always too busy. Always too tired to stop running and start living instead.

The horror of her existence was ever present. It stalked her day and night. And so she projected it upon scapegoats so that they could take responsibility for her actions in a way that she never had any intention of doing. 

The patsies for this projection were a succession of men. She lured them in and then she rejected them. The better they were, the more swiftly and harder they fell. And so the biggest arsehole was afforded the longest of tenures and as a result, the odds of his finding a fertile ground were increased.

This was not how her romantic life played out in the fantastical arena of her ever escaping mind, of course. The structure created by her abandonment issues created a bungee of intense romance and love that then failed. The more real and loving the relationship became, the more likely it was to fail. Her desire to be loved again and again was ferocious and the blinding wonderment of the initial honeymoon period was wish fulfilment for her. It didn’t matter who was cast as the actor opposite her. The Spring of her potential love was wild and free and boundless. She came, she saw and she envisioned a happily ever after that was a cure all to the sordid reality of life. But woe betide anyone who genuinely loved her. She was not equipped for the authentic. She dwelt in the enchanted forests of her impossible standards and she was as fragile as the stage background behind her.

The man who changed her life was broken beyond measure. They found each other as they ran side by side. Fleeing reality with a fetid fervour that provided the illusion of commonality. Neither of them slowed as they collided. To slow may mean to stop, and that would lead to being caught and savaged by life itself. They were too frightened and heightened for that.

If her previous romances had been intense, she could not remember anything of that heat. Here was something entirely different. They burned each other in a wrestling match of desperation. There was tooth and there was claw. Sex was what connected them. Everything else was a meaningless mess that they conveniently ignored. That casual ignorance came easily to them both and when it wore thin, they would fuck like fighting animals until they were too exhausted to care about bed linen that had not been changed for over a year.

But then time meant nothing. Time was a part of reality and they were agreed, reality was overrated. Reality was to be hated. In the heat of their union, the world could fuck right off.

Her pregnancy was a shock. Once upon a time, she had been careful. The degradation of her care followed the downward trajectory of her life. It mattered less and less until she got to a point that she worked with a set of ludicrous assumptions. One of those assumptions was that she couldn’t get pregnant.

This change in her physical state was not a wake-up call as much as a tiresome inconvenience. She had a raised awareness, but that was of the undue hassle that it would cause him. And so she deployed her usual weapon; avoidance. 

Avoidance was running.

Avoidance was looking away.

Avoidance was doing anything other than that which was required.

Her approach to her pregnancy was that she would ignore it in the hope that it would go away. After all, that was the habit she had been born into and grown up with. A delusion that still seemed to be working well for both her parents.

In the end though, there was no denying the burgeoning truth. In the most ridiculous of cliches, he went out one morning for a pint of milk and a clandestine packet of cigarettes, his smoking  being the most badly kept of secrets that annoyed and upset her, and he never returned. A case of out of sight and out of mind for them both.

The truth was that he never really left. After all, he’d planted his seed within her and she would forever more be with him. But then she carried all those ships that had sailed upon her seas, whether she cared to acknowledge that or not. Running from her very nature was a hamster wheel. A glorious treadmill of asinine absurdity, but she painted it differently all the same. Such was the nature she had adopted and made her own.

When Julian was born, she told herself that she was not a natural mother. She was adept at this self-destructive dialogue and took it that step too far by saying these things aloud. Contrary spells designed to create obstacles and deliver ruinous outcomes. Saying the words meant that they were outside of her, and she could blame them for their extraneous nature. She was well aware that thoughts that dwelt in her head could be deemed to be her own, so all the better to expel them and pretend they weren’t hers at all.

The conflict she produced made life painfully interesting. More so because she regularly took the line of least resistance. An easy life was for her, and so she did do at least the bare minimum. The tasks that were required also meant that she was in contact with her son and he responded favourably to her picking him up and holding him. She was largely unaware of her reciprocal response. Her very nature betrayed her and she loved this tiny man in a way she had never loved a man before.

The change in Jane was ever so gradual. She would have called it insidious, having been drawn to a place she had avoided all her life. Julian was not exceptional, but for him she made an exception without ever seeing it for what it was. 

Love.

Julian broke her already broken heart apart with the strength and patience of the tectonic plates and her heart healed of its own accord, as it was always wont to do. Jane’s urge to run may still have been fierce, but she had no option other than to face Julian each and every day and in facing him, she was transformed into herself.

The birth of her son introduced Jane to a universal truth. Life only works when a person takes responsibility for themselves and their actions. The peculiar thing about humanity was that for most, it took being a parent to begin taking ownership for who they were and what they did. That responsibility had to happen in order for a person to adequately parent. It was not possible to be responsible for your own child if you weren’t responsible for yourself.

All this really was, was looking after herself. It wasn’t big and it certainly wasn’t clever. But it was far more clever than the running she’d been indulging in for all of her life prior to Julian gate crashing the party. Running from herself. Running from fears that were magnetised to her so that they pursued her to the ends of the Earth and beyond. 

The sad fact about fear was it was home grown. It only grew in the fertile soils of the mind. If a person was afraid of dogs, that had nothing whatsoever to do with dogs. There was nothing a dog could do about the fear a person carried around with them. But a dog would respond to that fear and in responding, the fearful person was likely to behave badly towards the dog. Thousands of years of domestication and someone comes along and stuffs it all up, whilst blaming the dog for being a dog. Supposedly clever monkeys made dumb by their inability to connect and love.

Love was what saved Jane. Pure and simple love. She found herself with a man who was attentive and loved her unconditionally. A man who listened to her with an intensity that hurt. At times, Jane thought she was falling apart, having a heart attack or a stroke. Her body succumbed to a rollercoaster of emotions and she had nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. There was only the here and now. And Julian.

In the first months of Julian’s life, Jane cried often. Tears of sadness. Tears of pain. Tears of suppressed rage. And tears of joy. The latter would be punctuated with and rounded off with delirious laughter. There were sighs, and there were groans, and after a while, there was a loving diatribe that became thoroughly therapeutic.

Jane lived through the grief of change. The death of a badly constructed mask that had been smothering her true self. This was always necessary, but it hurt all the same. 

Jane learnt to talk. She opened her heart to her little son and as the words spilt out, she learnt who she really was. She was more than half way through the Gordian Knot of her pain when she realised what it was that she had embarked upon, and in that revelatory moment she felt her spirits soar. Looking down upon the smiling and radiant face of her son she at last understood.

“I’m going to have a loving relationship with you, buster,” she said softly to her little man, “I’m going to be your mother. I’m always going to be here for you. Open. Loving. Me.” The final word was said with such passion and meaning that she felt its power, and Julian must have too because his smile became a huge beaming thing, and then it broke into a delightful giggle.

Jane joined her baby in this laughter, “mock your own mother would you!?” she playfully chided, and then she raised him up and blew raspberries upon his soft and fragrant neck.

As the moment subsided, she sighed and foresaw a time when Julian would no longer be a baby, “all things shall pass,” she whispered to her son, but she was still smiling. There were adventures to be had beyond these times. Many adventures that would contain treasure chests of happiness. 

That night, as Julian slept soundly in the cot beside her bed, Jane stared at the ceiling and discerned her new future. The destiny that she had glimpsed in wonderful moments with this new life that she had brought into the world was taking shape, as she was also taking shape. Previously, she had thought it too hard and too dangerous to take such a path, but now she knew what had always been at play. She had thought herself unworthy, and sought worth in others. Externalising her validation produced an anxiety within her that was crippling. She mistook this for vulnerability when really it was a complete loss of control and also of coherence. What she had been doing made no sense, but then fear and anger never did.

Jane looked across at the slumbering form of her small child, his chest barely moving as he slept. He was facing her with the most peaceful of expressions and her heart melted once again. A heart that she had begun to think was beyond love. A heart that was now so full of love it lit up this bedroom. An eternal flame that would forever burn for her son. A light that symbolised the worth that she had been born with, had always had and would always possess. She was here for a reason. Julian reflected that truth as she gazed upon him. 

How could she run from that?

That was when she made the decision to stop running and to continue to go through her pain. For Julian. For her. For those she already knew and those who awaited her further along the path of life.

She nodded to herself and then slipped into the sweetest of dreams, her face the twin of her son, wearing the beauty of a peace that had eluded her until she forgotten her fears and her anger at the world and remembered herself and what counted; her worth and her potential to love and to be.

Jane would come to realise that her parents had unwittingly hurt and isolated her and in the cold, silence of her pain she had created an invisible trap. She had equated their love with something that hurt and this had led her to a pattern of false hope and avoidance. That wasn’t love, but she had not allowed herself to see it for what it really was. She was perpetuating a bad state of affairs. Hurting herself, finding people to hurt her, or hurting them if they weren’t up to the job of causing her pain.

Julian deserved better, and so Jane at last owned herself and her actions, learning how to bestow upon him the love she had so desperately wanted and needed. She’d got there in the end, escaped the trap of her own making and started over. This was a good start. She was already wise enough to know that this was only the start. She had a lifetime of love ahead of her.

They say that a mother’s first love is her father, and her last love is her son. Jane didn’t know about that. She had a lot of love to give and when the time was right, for her and for Julian, she thought she may well meet a man who she could love in a way that worked for them all. She was open to that and that was what counted. Understood that her vulnerability was not something she could deny or run from, that to embrace it was to love herself and to draw strength from herself and her very nature. 

One day, she would sit Julian down and tell him how he saved her. She would thank him and when he became awkward, verging on the dismissive, she’d hug him and explain the life of gratitude she’d lived from the day he’d been born. That his birthday was also a celebration of the day that she had stopped running. Running from fears that pursued her however far she ran. Running from love. Running from herself. She would point out the life she had lived. The life he was all too aware of, and compare it with the existence she’d eked out before he came into this world. She would explain that this was a warning, as well as a celebration. Never to lose his way. Never to lose himself. Always to be true to his values and himself. That his worth was in who he was, and that was all there was to it. Then she’d hug him that bit harder and tell him she loved him, and she’d mean it in a way that she had never known possible. A love that made everything worthwhile. Her worth and her love shining brightly in the world, just as it was always meant to.