Walking on Eggshells
Jane Sloan
Word Count 841
What he railed against: wet towels on the bathroom floor; books, pens, and papers left scattered on the dining-room table once our homework was done; the three of us sprawling on the floor in front of the tv after dinner; what he called ‘talking back’, which might simply be one of us asking a reasonable question about something he’d told us to do.
But doors slamming—that really drove him nuts.
We pushed car doors with our hips to muffle the sound of their closing. Cupboards in the kitchen could be treacherous; similarly, the fridge.
We learned to tip-toe around so as not to disturb him.
When a landlord refused to refund the bond on the house where we lived, due to what he deemed was ‘excessive wear and tear to the carpets’, our father yelled at him, ‘What do you expect, that we walk on bloody air?’ and I thought to myself, we already do.
Indoors, we spoke with lowered voices and winced when our friends raised theirs, fearful of his response.
Outdoors, we became loud and noisy, releasing our pent up energy in gymnastics competitions, tree climbing (to dangerous heights), and cricket matches on the front lawn.
One afternoon, after he’d chastised us for playing too close to the picture window, the ball smashed through the large glass pane. We turned to the neighbour who’d joined us and yelled ‘Run!’ Having leapt the front gate, my brother was already half-way down the street before our father came rushing out.
Years later I ran into an old classmate who, during our conversation asked, ‘Is your dad still really scary?’ ‘Yes,’ I wanted to answer, ‘Yes. Although he’s been dead for a while now.’
*
Other people’s homes were alive with sounds: laughter, shouts, chair legs scraping on linoleum, a dog barking, cutlery rattling on a plate, heavy footsteps, a schoolbag dropped to the floor.
In our home, we conducted ourselves quietly. Or as quietly as we could.
*
Once, when the wind caught the heavy front door, slamming it behind me, he launched himself from his armchair, grabbed me by the shoulder, and slapped my face. No amount of explaining that it hadn’t been intentional would have saved me.
*
According to research undertaken by Caroline Campanella and J. Douglas Bremner, functional neuroimaging shows that in the person living with PTSD, ‘(T)he amygdala, which mediates emotional and fear responses, is hyper-responsive, whereas the frontal cortex, which is implicated in appraisal and regulation, is hypo-responsive’. [1]
Among the symptoms of PTSD are irritability or outbursts of anger, hypervigilance, and an exaggerated startle response.
*
Our father didn’t fight in a war, though he lived through one when he was young and this brought its own hardships. What he did experience was a series of events which my brother and I inadvertently pieced together during a dinner conversation when we were sharing anecdotes that had a cumulative and disastrous effect on our father.
While doing his national service with the RAF, he was required to visit crash sites to recover plane wreckage, which was needed when investigating accidents. Sometimes, the team arrived before anyone else and it was they who had to deal with the bodies.
This I’d never known.
Our mother had related to me the story of how, early one Saturday morning, our father received an urgent phone call summoning him to a demolition site. One of the men from the factory where our father was the manager had been working there with his sixteen-year old son. In his shock, he hadn’t known who else to contact when the boy was crushed by a concrete slab that had fallen from the floor above. Our father was there when the slab was lifted away. ‘When he came back and told me what had happened, that was one of the few times I’ve ever seen him cry,’ our mother had said.
My brother hadn’t heard this before.
I also knew about a later incident in another factory where machinery pulverized stone into small pieces that were then added to clay. A man’s arm had been caught in the mechanism, which pulled him in, past the shoulder, before the emergency button could be hit. My father was called to the scene and watched as the mangled body was removed.
My brother hadn’t heard this one.
Sitting in the restaurant amidst the noisy chatter his face turned as pale as the tablecloth when I said, ‘I think Dad had PTSD.’
*
Whilst it's considered inadvisable to come up with a diagnosis based on a few stories and recollections, we both understood, in that moment, that there was now a possible explanation for our father’s unpredictable and explosive rages, his frequent withdrawals from family life, and what we had, until this point, considered his ridiculous way of responding to noise.
And there were the beginnings of forgiveness, too.
Endnote:
[1] Campanella, Caroline and J. Douglas Bremner, ‘Neuroimaging of PTSD’ in J. Douglas Bremner (ed.) Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: From Neurobiology to Treatment, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New Jersey, 2016, p. 312
Jane teaches high school, hoping that by catching them young she can inspire her students to enjoy writing imaginatively and riskily. She is a street photographer and has had short stories published in Australian literary journals. She also contributes to mETAphor, the English Teacher's Association magazine, mostly articles about craft and creativity, including 'Discursive Writing: How Not to Tame the Shaggy Beast', which explores the wildness of creative non-fiction.