haunted

“A monstah!” My daughter Piper points at me and giggles delightedly, sprinting across the grass away from me. I dash after her and scoop her up, tip her upside down and pretend to chomp on her belly. Her laughter becomes uncontrollable. This is currently one of her favorite games and I am almost always delegated to the role of terrifying monster that wants to gobble her up. Sometimes she is the monster and I get to run from her as she raises her arms like tiny claws and growls, all the while grinning from ear to ear. 

I’ve reflected during the many hours of playing this game with her, that although my daughter loves to pretend she is scared of “monstahs,” she actually is delighted by them. I’ve wondered, at what point in life does this change? When do the scary monsters come? When do we begin to be afraid of an imagined and terrifying unknown? At what point do we start to feel weighed down by regret? At what point does depression overcome normal sadness? At what point do our minds develop enough that we can become haunted by them? 

These questions are particularly poignant to me because I don’t have memories from when my mind first became a haunted place. My mother remembers me being not much older than my Piper when I first exhibited signs of OCD. She innocently asked me to help pick up sticks in our backyard. This seems like a task any young child would be delighted to take part in, but I broke down in tears and cried “I can’t stop picking up sticks!” 

While I don’t remember this particular event, I do remember walking home from school and not being able to pass by a piece of litter without retrieving it. I remember washing my hands until they were raw, obeying the persistent loop in my mind to wash them again and again. I remember the bedtime rituals that required I pray exactly right before I could rest my tired head. I felt like I was stuck on a never ending merry go round, a slave to the demands of my broken mind. This kind of prison of the brain truly feels like being haunted by oneself. 

OCD, anxiety, depression, regret, heartache, and every other dark part of having a human mind in a broken world are the monsters I want desperately to protect my daughter from. I want to be able to stop them before they even have a chance. I don’t want her to inherit a haunted mind from me. Of course I know I don’t have the power to stop darkness, or change genetics. There is just something about watching her giggle about monsters that makes me believe that there is some way I can keep her like this: full of joy and energy, delighted, secure, unafraid, and most importantly unencumbered by her own brilliant mind. 

It breaks my heart to imagine darkness creeping into her mind and heart. It breaks my heart that darkness is the reality of this broken world. 

If and when the monsters do become frightening, or her mind becomes scary, I hope she knows she can come to me, and more importantly to God. We can face the darkness together. One thing my haunted mind has taught me is that the Light of the world can overcome any darkness. That miracle is made even more brilliantly clear, against the backdrop of a dark mind. 

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Haunted".