Camera dread

Ever since my business partner and I started setting up our new company, she had been warning me that we were eventually going to need to do a photo shoot.

She's a photographer as well as a designer, and she already had her own company and website as well, so getting a professional photo of her for the site was no problem. She had a whole line-up of favorites.

But all I had for a head shot of myself was a cute snapshot that my daughter had taken on my birthday last year.

"It's okay for now," my business partner had said diplomatically. "But at some point we'll need to get professional shots of you for the website."

I'd been delaying it and dreading it in equal measure. Since reaching my mid-forties, I've become almost phobic about getting my picture taken. Last year, a couple of high school boys who were doing a project on community journalism wanted to videotape an interview with me. The fear of how I would look on film caused me to perspire through the entire interview. Despite promising to send me a copy of their finished product, they never did, and I'm convinced it's because they didn't want to embarrass me with how I looked on screen.

My business partner must have grown weary of my deferrals every time she suggested a photo shoot, because Sunday morning she sent me a cursory text. I thought she was just letting me know what time she'd pick me up for the trip we'd planned to the beach to take some landscape shots for an upcoming project, but her text made it clear that there were other purposes to the trip. "Wear a white shirt and tan pants," she wrote. "And makeup."

So this was serious, and sent me into a fresh tailspin of worries about brow creases and crow's feet.

Not that my quasi-phobia is strictly the result of aging. At 25, in the hours before my wedding ceremony began, I stood in the sunshine outside a pretty little New England chapel while our wedding photographer did shot after shot. "Karen, it's just me," I said finally. "How good do you really think it's going to get?"

So I try to avoid photos. But my business partner is really good at what she does, and one of the things she does is photography. She made me feel comfortable with a relaxed pose and a beautiful background against the whitecaps of Plum Island. I started to feel less self-conscious as we proceeded through a series of shots. I laughed a little. I imagined that the blue sky and bright sun and sharp breeze blowing my hair around might compensate for the crow's feet and wrinkles.

And in the end, it really wasn't so bad. I've seen only a few samples of the photos, but I think they turned out okay. And that reminded me of something: that's what usually happens when I see pictures of myself. They really aren't so bad. I'm really not so bad. I worry so much about how the pictures will look, and then I find myself looking at a picture of a pleasant-looking, smiling, cheerful middle-aged woman with a few crow's feet but nothing all that hideous.

The pictures showed….me. No cover girl, but a pleasant person with an inoffensive appearance. If it didn’t forever quash my phobia, it reminded me of a simple truth: a smile does a lot. I looked happy and approachable in the photos, which is really just what we needed for our website. It would do. I would do.

I may not be ready for my close-up, to paraphrase the classic movie line, but I’m okay with a mid-distance shot profiled against the ocean on a beautiful fall afternoon.

Afraid of the storm

As I drove home during rush hour yesterday evening, I remembered our Minister Emeritus’ favorite Bible passage: “Be not afraid.”

The problem was that I was afraid, a little. Dark pewter clouds hung overhead and there was an ominous stillness in the air. Though no rain was falling yet, every few minutes a line of white-yellow lightning made a vertical streak through the clouds. All afternoon, my office window had offered a tableau of blue sky and sunshine, but I had already received word that there were thunderstorms at home, 20 miles away, and I sensed as I merged onto the highway that I was driving straight toward them.

But then I remembered our minister saying that his favorite phrase from the Bible was that ever-so-simple one of just three words, that remarkably unadorned command: Be not afraid.

Driving on a highway in a thunderstorm should not be a scary experience, I reasoned with myself. This is rain, not snow: ice is not going to be a problem. On this wide interstate, there’s no threat of trees falling. And even if I don’t have as firm a grasp on the physics of electricity as I should, I do know that cars offer fairly reliable protection from lightning.

So as the clouds opened up and buckets of rain started falling into the roadway, I repeated it to myself again: Be not afraid. Yes, there’s something intuitively unnerving about so much noise and so many bright flashes. And yes, the sheets of water pouring down from the sky do decrease visibility a little bit. But it was broad daylight and everyone seemed to be driving carefully. I knew my fear was just general instinct and not common sense.

Being afraid is almost never productive, I reminded myself. Its opposite, being brave, can however be very useful. And its corollary, being cautious, is often a positive thing as well. But straight-out fear? Over being in a car on a wide straight highway when it’s raining? Not useful at all.

So I tried to focus on other aspects of the storm besides its improbable dangers. The color of the lightning against the gray sky was beautiful. The rain would help my newly planted herbs grow, as well as everything else that had recently been planted in gardens and farms all around me. And the slower traffic might actually make my commute safer than it was on an ordinary June evening.

It rained hard for a while, and then the storm lessened. I thought of one of my grandmother’s many peculiar turns of phrase about weather: “It has to get it out of its system.” Not withstanding the linguistic awkwardness of the repeated “its” in that sentence, we were always a little bit amused by her arbitrary interpretation of meteorology, but the thought that the rain would purge itself was indeed comforting. Maybe this means it will be clear for Tim’s class beach party on Wednesday, I reasoned, and even better, for his graduation next Monday.

Maybe. Or maybe not. But it was true that I didn’t have much to fear in this particular storm. Be not afraid: a message that once again reminded me of the uselessness of fear. Next time I’m driving in a storm, maybe I’ll be slower to let anxiety take over. I was safely home an hour later. My herb garden was flourishing in the fresh rainfall. And everything was fine.

Be not afraid

During Sunday’s sermon, our Minister Emeritus shared his favorite quotation from Jesus: “Be not afraid.” The minister then ran through a litany of categories that most of us fear: change, stasis, sameness, differences, life, death, knowledge, ignorance, and so on.

He didn’t specifically mention dental surgery (nor did Jesus, as far as I know), but since I was 24 hours from my first scheduled gum graft, I took the message to heart anyway.

It’s so easy to let our fears rule us, whether those are truly profound fears such as terminal illness and national security or truly trivial fears such as temporary physical discomfort. My dentist first recommended that I see a periodontist seven years ago, and I’ve known since then that I’d eventually need to undergo gum graft procedures, but I managed to put it off year after year because I was so apprehensive.

The problem was that neglecting to schedule the procedure created a different fear: the fear of regular dental cleanings. First of all, the cleanings generate pain that might be alleviated once my gums are treated; but secondly, I always felt so abashed to have to admit that no, once again, I had not taken the dentist’s recommendation to schedule a periodontal appointment. Finally, two months ago, he instilled in me a new fear: the fear that my teeth would start falling out if I didn’t attend to this matter.

The gum surgery is now 48 hours behind me and I feel fine. Yes, there was a fair amount of discomfort during the procedure and a lot more as the Novacaine wore off throughout the afternoon. Yes, I’ve been hungry for the past two days since there’s so little I can eat during the short-term healing process. And yes, my left cheek looks like it is storing a golf ball.

But none of it is as bad as my fears led me to believe. “Be not afraid,” I should have told myself earlier, and then all of this would be done by now. But I was afraid, and so I’m undergoing the discomfort now that could potentially be seven years behind me by this point.

This experience, plus the minister’s reminder of Jesus’ words, made me think of the other fairly trivial things of which I’m currently feeling afraid. One significant source of apprehension in my life right now is seeing my kids grow older. At the ages of nine and thirteen, they seem to me to be at the absolutely ideal ages from a parenting perspective: they’re fun, happy, resourceful, independent and confident.

By this time next year, Tim will be in eighth grade and we’ll be learning about the systems and inner workings of the public high school, a setting I dread simply because it’s so unfamiliar to me. At nine, Holly embodies all the merriment of girlhood, but as Caitlin Flanagan’s controversial new book, Girl Land, and her frequent NPR interviews remind me, all kinds of scary things potentially lie in her path as she approaches early adolescence. In another sixteen months, our lease runs out and we’ll need to find another place to live. My parents and parents-in-law are healthy, but that won’t last forever. And are the kids’ college tuition funds in good enough shape at this point?

So much to be afraid of, and yet really nothing to be afraid of except the normal progression of a blessed life. Gum surgery isn’t pleasant, but not being able to afford or have access to necessary dental procedures is surely worse.

As I prepared to leave the periodontist’s office after the procedure, a woman in the waiting room smiled sympathetically at me. “You look really uncomfortable,” she said.

“Well, not uncomfortable enough to merit putting this off for seven years,” I admitted. Be not afraid. I’m not sure the singular experience of getting through a gum graft is enough to allay all of my daily anxieties, but it’s a lesson I’ll take to heart nonetheless, and try to put to good use going forward.

Love your (revolting small brown eight-legged) enemies

I have resolved to try harder to follow the words of Matthew in the New Testament: Love your enemies.

And by my enemies, I of course mean ticks.

Wood ticks: The large brown disgusting ones. Deer ticks: The ineffably tiny ones, so often compared in size to “the period at the end of this sentence,” so much less revolting to look at, in my opinion, and yet even more dangerous as carriers of Lyme disease.

New England in general and Carlisle in particular are replete with ticks. I absolutely despise them, and yet I know it’s a repulsion I need to try to overcome. I can’t be a responsible mother, dog owner, or citizen of the countryside if I can’t get over my natural impulse whenever I see one, which is to yell for Rick.

This has become particularly clear to me over the past week. Despite Carlisle’s reputation, at least within its own geographical boundaries, of being the Lyme disease capital of the world, there are years when I’ve gone the entire warm-weather season without seeing a single tick.

This year apparently will not be one of them. I found one on Holly’s bed as she was waking up earlier this week, and another one making its way across the dog’s snout. Then this morning as Holly was drying off after her shower, I found one of the tiny ones embedded in her hip.

But the find that leaves me with the worst feelings was yesterday afternoon. I had just checked in at the doctor’s office for some routine lab work when I felt something brushing across my bare arm. I looked and saw a large brown tick. I was so startled that without thinking I brushed it off of me – and then couldn’t find it. Not on the floor, not on the chair where I’d been sitting. Somehow I’d released a tick into the doctor’s waiting room. The guilt I felt about my part in so nonchalantly foisting off a tick onto the next unfortunate person to stand in the wrong place in that waiting room was overwhelming; I felt like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. I wanted to find it and dispose of it properly, but I couldn’t. And yet I knew it would make its way some other poor unsuspecting patient.

When I’m by myself and see ticks, I can usually force myself to deal with it as needed: using tweezers, or my bare fingers, whatever works. But if Rick is around, I still can’t resist the impulse to call for reinforcements – an instinct so embarrassing to me that I pretend to him that there’s some other reason I called him, as if I just wanted advice and not someone else to do the dirty work. “It’s so tiny; I just wanted a second opinion on whether it’s really a tick and not a scab before I start tweezing at her skin,” I told him when I found the tick after Holly’s shower. Of course, he then found the tweezers and got to work on it, just as I knew he would.

Research tells me it was either Machiavelli or The Godfather who said “Keep your friends close, your enemies even closer.” At first blush, this phrase seems inapplicable when it comes to ticks. Keeping them as far away as possible seems like better advice. But no, I remind myself, the point is that ticks are going to show up whether you want them to or not, and “keeping them even closer” means not only being able to bear them but being really comfortable with them. Grab those tweezers; get your hands dirty; be fearless.

I try to imagine a form of hypnosis that might make it easier for me to approach a tick without hyperventilating. Notice how small they are instead of how gross they are, I tell myself. One thousandth your size at the most. You are the dominant creature here. You are in charge.

Maybe. But it doesn’t feel that way when I’m looking at one, whether it’s on my child’s pale flesh, in the dog’s fur or scurrying across my arm. Absolutely disgusting. And yet absolutely necessary for me to be able to confront comfortably. I’m working on it. And eventually I’ll get there.