About Claustrophobia and Glaciers

Heights bother me, not claustrophobia. What would I do—I question my interior self—wedged in a dark space, say in a cave, beneath the earth, confined, constricted, and suffocated by stone? My interior self answers smugly (and let me accuse it accurately) self-deceptively—Why, I’d not panic, obviously.  I’d wiggle, and if wedged further, closer, tighter, I’d simply relax and wait for the tug backward on my boots to haul me from the grasping clutch of claustrophobia. Rasp of sandstone. Drip of stalactite. Echo of scattering pebbles.

My interior self dismisses fear of tight spaces. It’s heights that bother me. What would I do—I question my smug interior self—standing on the tip-top edge of the Empire State building, looking through fencing at the Lego-world beneath? My palms seep a mute response while my interior self sobs and hauls all major muscle groups far, far from the edge of the imagined brink.

Heights bother me. Small spaces? Not so much.

I blame the sweaty palm print I leave on the door of the cable car on the fact that we are descending from the peak of a French alpine mountain. I am stuffed in a red cabin the size of a typical American clothes closet. The car dangles over an abyss. It’s the dangling, not claustrophobia, that causes my interior self to quiver. The car moves downward (a direction synonymous with “safety”) to the Mer de Glace glacier in Chamonix, France. If my knees manage to firm from jello to cartilage, I intend to explore an ice grotto cut into a living glacier.

The door closes. I eye the latch, which seems to lack commitment to purpose in life. The void beyond whistles for my attention. My interior self plays the “what if?” game, picturing my body revolting from all mental control and flinging against the rickety red door in response to the whistle. There go my palms again. Signs on the car windows warn in multiple languages of the dangers of an ice ax inadvertently slicing, spearing, or decapitating a fellow traveller in the confined space. Is there a name for the fear of ice ax murderers? What category of human populates this red cable car so that ice ax safety warning signs are necessary? 

The agonizing descent from the heights allows me time to consider window decal warnings anyone of any language could comprehend. In this death-trap of a car, one should not smoke. One should not playfully attempt to rock the car back and forth. One should not descend with open doors and feet dangling into the gaping abyss (Who would dare? my incredulous interior self scoffs).  Get me out of this small, constricting space.

I think of constriction. I remember how my children’s delight increased when I placed my thumb over the garden hose and blasted water through a hot July sky. As the water peppered them with added force, my daughters’ shrieks increased in timbre and volume. One girl’s baby belly was ringed by a pink ruffle on her bathing suit. One butt cheek stuck out. It was speckled with muddy grass blades. The other girl’s curls plastered her neck. Swings jangled on the swingset. Puddles filled around the hostas. The tabby cat stretched in the sun just out of reach of the hose’s arc. Constriction expanded into joy that rainbowed through neighborhood backyards.

Having a child constricted me. My first daughter arrived an unexpected six weeks before hospital bags were packed or infant carseats installed. Life squeezed itself into a closet-sized space. For months, I wedged into my house with a fragile, premature baby, and I counseled my interior self to wait calmly in that confining, suffocating space for a backward tug on my boots. The tug did not come.

My therapist asked me to draw a map of my world. I drew my house. My street. A row of trees between my house and the neighbor. I drew the coffee shop two and a half blocks away. I handed it to the therapist, hoping she’d see my suffocation. “These trees are interesting,” she commented—Yes, my interior self rallied at the tug on a shoelace, Rescue!—“Drawing these trees shows you’re rooted. Home is important to you.” I looked at the row of prison fence trees I’d drawn and saw no roots I wanted to nurture deeper. Claustrophobia bothered me after all. My palms just didn’t show it as my hands changed diapers and pushed the stroller handles to the coffee shop and back again.

I fear claustrophobia less than heights. Claustrophobia ends in exhalation, hope, and renewed possibility. The map I’d draw today of my neighborhood a decade after being released from the constriction of a premature newborn? My house. A row of trees. The coffee shop. I’d now encourage my prison trees to root deeper, stronger. Grow, my interior self whispers. Grow straighter, higher, and spread sheltering limbs of shade and tree-climbing potential around me. We came through something together, these constricting, restricting children of mine. My job is no longer the same as it was before their journeys through the birth canal into the expansive world. My friends have changed. My bank account has shrunk. My weeks’ activities have shuffled. But tugged into a new life, I have done more, seen more, cried more, laughed more, grieved more, and rejoiced more than before children claustrophobiaed me. Squeezed, I expanded.

That dangling red cable car saves me an altitude of steps, but I worry someone, possibly my two children, will inadvisedly rock the car to and fro. My eyes screw shut, preferring constriction to opening wide to take in the alpine vistas. I plummet from the summit to the glacier floor. The further, safer down I go, I dare glance at the summit of Mount Dru. That French alp whittles to needle thin at the top, defiantly pricking the linen cloud that attempts to riffle past unmolested. Rock and snow and ice scratch down the sides of the mountain, jumbling in a heap at the base. I face down three fears by the time I enter the ice grotto: Heights, claustrophobia, iceaxdecapitation. I feel relief. But the greater payoff is expansion.

Fear constricts blood vessels, but wonder expands the soul. I step from the constricting closet of a cable car into an ice world beyond anything I’d experienced. Carved through the underbelly of a glacier is the ice grotto of twisting tunnels. The ice bends the sunlight blue. Water from the melting glacier trickles under the rubber floor matting. Around each bend a new delight—a window carved into a wall of ice. A chair sculpted from the frozen water. I catch one of my daughters licking a wall. I do not scold, but my maternal interior self frets about reintroducing ice-age bacteria into modern digestive tracts. I say nothing because some fears gain nothing from being shared.

 Constriction leads me to this ice wonderland of expansion. I physically constrict myself into a closet. I mentally constrict my fears into oozes of terror that weep from my palms. I emerge, fill my lungs, unclench my fists and reach out on either side of me to feel frozen walls brush my fingertips. I maybe, maybe, hazard a lick of ice when no one is looking.

I’ve wriggled my way through the constriction of mothering the baby and toddler years, and I find the elementary and middle school years with my children refreshingly expansive. I can breathe again. I look back at myself as a 32-year-old mother from the dizzying vangtage point of an older, smugger 42-year-old self. Is higher better? Looking down from my lofty heights, do I judge 32-year-old me too harshly? She is not smiling as she holds her thumb over the hose and douses her children. She is unshowered and it is the afternoon and she is counting the hours by the minute until small people tuck into bed. She is stuck. Surviving, but waiting for a tug on her boot to pull her back. She doesn’t know yet she will give up waiting and instead wriggle forward into a world that will expand around her. She will breathe deeply again. She will smile. She will wonder how it’s bedtime already and she still has so much to squeeze into the day. 42-year-old me works hard at not judging this younger self who did not and could not see from the bottom of the mountain all she would see from the dizzying heights.

All that to say, I think I’m right. Heights bother me more than claustrophobia.