Letting go

Letting go by forgiving

THE SNAKE AND THE WELL

Learning a lesson two decades later

I can’t ever remember being a child, per se, I’ve always felt like an adult, and when I think back to growing up on farms, I can’t help but recall numerous events I’d rather not. However, something occurred to me today, and it made me realize that all of the farm experiences I had were to help me better understand my adult life, my relationships, and myself. Not just the relationship between me and my father, but my relationship with myself. I’ve carried burdens and dismay with me for decades. I’ve locked them into little boxes and stored them away so I didn’t have to process them. I know I did this because part of me didn’t want to admit that those were pieces of my life. Of course, in saying that, it’s all about negative emotions and the responses I had to what I had faced, whether it was embarrassment for being the kid that grew up on a pig farm and all my shoes smelled like pig farm which never made for a pleasant homecoming dance, or anxiety for not knowing what my father wanted immediately when he wanted it and having fear of failing with menial tasks, or envy for my cousins who grew up in cities and knew not the rigors of farm life, or resentment for having to wake up as a child at 5 in the morning to get the pigs back in because the fencing was inadequate, or anger, anger, so much anger all misplaced, all manifest as inability to understand and process the various emotions I was dealing with at that time. So, I locked them away. But today I’ve found the key.

I could tell you countless farm stories, some that would make you laugh, some that would make you cry, some that would make you want to become a vegetarian, but the one I want to tell you about struck me as so impossibly unrelated to anything, but after I processed it, I realized that it was, in fact, the representation of everything I had locked away. One day my father and I were out working on the farm, effectively repairing some repairs from the day before. When we were finished, he asked me to go to the well to get some water for the pigs. I was exhausted. It was hot. Frankly, I was tired of shoddy repair work that kept us coming back to do the same things over and over. However, I want to make clear that it wasn’t my father’s lack of ability that kept our farm repairs high, it was his lack of help, and a 12 year old boy isn’t exactly what our farm needed, it needed about 4 more of my dad. So I was on my way to the well, humphing and grrrring all the way there—I was ready to be done. I wanted to be inside where the air was on. It was Saturday—I wanted to be a kid. I approached the well, lifted the makeshift wooden lid we had covering the fairly large hole in the ground, and I lay flat on my stomach and dipped the bucket down into the well. As the bucket was filling with water I heard a noise that is one of the few noises you simply cannot mistake for another. We were living in Kentucky at the time and the state is home to various species of snakes, in this instance, the rattlesnake. I look up and see on the other side of the well a rattlesnake looking back at me. I let go of the bucket, stood up, and went back to my father, trembling. He too was hot, tired, and ready to be done. He asked me where the water was, but his tone matched both of our nasty moods. So my response to my father, for the first time ever, took every emotion I had felt, every piece of negativity I allowed within me, everything I wanted to say but never did and came out in a torrent of profanities and random crazy gibberish that ended with several, “snake! snake! snake!” And with that, I crossed the road and went inside, slamming, kicking, and banging all the way there.

I knew I was going to be sent to my room to think for a bit, so I went straight there to do exactly that. I felt beyond irritated with my father, I felt livid, I felt hatred that he would put me in harm and not care and not do anything about it, not validate my fear. As my emotions boiled, he came in the house, had a loud discussion with my mother about  me, then came to my door, let out a deep, “I’m furious with you” breath (his attempt at calming) and said, “there’s no snake by the well.” In that moment, in that exact moment, I wanted to be like Carrie and set everything on fire with my eyes. It was bad enough that I was struggling to understand my emotions and that each of them were at a peak, but to have it all dismissed with a simple, “there’s nothing there” invalidated me to the core. Now all of my emotions about the farm work that I didn’t want to do turned instead to my father, and they stayed there.

Here I am, 22 years later, reflecting on a snake, that was there, and a well, perhaps his home, and what it all means. I see now that I clearly startled the snake when I lifted the lid to the well. We both came to notice the other at about the same time, freaked out in a similar manner, and went opposite ways. But in a moment, fear aside, we both realized that neither of us wanted to be where we were. I didn’t want to be on my stomach dipping a bucket into a watery hole in the ground, and the snake didn’t want to be disrupted from its sleep in its temporary home. I wanted to be a kid; I wanted a chance to process my emotions, so that I could understand them and adapt; I wanted to not be farming. And so, with the snake as a sort of catalyst, I boxed up my emotions, my beliefs, my everything, and turned it outward to anger and hatred towards my father for what, at the time, I felt was his complete invalidation of me.