Sense and Sensibility

Bees, Mothers and a False Security

My son has developed an irrational fear of bees.

Hyacinth bloom along the foundation of the house, bringing with them the menacing buzz of insects, many of them bees and all of them, in my son’s overactive imagination, out to get him.

He will not go outside.

This is ridiculous, I tell him. “You are the last thing on a bee’s mind,” I tell him, but he reminds me that I have no access to the mind of a bee, nor any particular aptitude for deciphering it, and so we are back to the absurdity of unreasonable fear.

This anxiety is of long incubation. Last summer, during Vacation Bible School, my son was stung by a bee for the first time in his life. Evidently the event sufficiently traumatized him to develop into a full-fledged phobia and has not incidentally probably ruined my chances for Vacation Bible School this summer to boot.

Scientists say that bad memories are particularly more tenacious than good ones for evolutionary reasons; the adrenaline involved in frightening experiences appears to seals in emotionally charged memories. Dr. Larry Cahill, a professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California-Irvine, found that emotional arousal helps us remember threatening events and circumstances – like my son’s bee sting.

So, my mother was right; we do remember bad events better than good ones, largely because benign memories don’t pose a threat and are, from the evolutionary standpoint, worthless.

My son falsely believes that I can defend him from the bees, a degree of faith I hardly merit.  But the problem is that all children believe their parents can shield them from peril, a delusion largely of our own making. “I’m here,” we whisper. “You’re safe.”  In the stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” now playing at TheaterWorks Hartford, Didion wonders about the deception inherent in maternal reassurance. “’Did I lie to you?’” she asks her fatally ill daughter, Quintana. “Did I lie to you all my life? When I said, ‘You’re safe, I’m here,’ was that a lie or did you believe it? Is a lie only a story that the hearer disbelieves? Is that the only definition of a lie? Or did you believe it?”

When I was 25 and living outside Washington, D.C., I became chronically ill with mononucleosis. I had trouble breathing. I couldn’t move without pain. I dreamed in sweaty, tempestuous whorls of color. I was unable to work.

“You’ll be fine,” my mother told me initially, convinced it was merely a virus. “You’re as healthy as a horse.” After six months with no improvement, my mother phoned me and, receiving the same bleak report, broke down in tears. “I can’t do anything for you!” she wailed. “When you were young and you fell, I could stop the bleeding and hold you in my arms and make it better, but I can’t do that now.”

That was the moment when I discovered that my mother was powerless against caprice, a shattering epiphany that baptized me into adulthood. We had both lost – she her magical curative powers and I, my ability to believe in them.

 When my son asks me to hold him as we pad through the garden, I feel empowered by the fervor of his trust, and complicit in this vital deception of childhood. Soon, sooner than I wish, I will no more be able to protect him from bees as I can from failed friendships, unrequited love or the indiscriminate ailments of mind and spirit. So much of tragedy is mercilessly bee-like, arbitrary and excruciating. The only way to steel oneself for it is by a little magical thinking, believing for a brief, evanescent while, that mommy can protect us from everything.