When "safe" means "stuck"

When my sister Beth had children, she told me how important it was to her that people come to her house. We didn’t have people over much when we were kids. Family secrets – my mother’s affair with a priest; my parents’ separation – had us keeping people at arm’s length. We weren’t forbidden from having friends over; it just was rare and not spoken of much. My mother, who was loving and wise, was an introvert; she needed her safe space. But I’ve carried that cloistered approach forward in ways that don’t fit me. Her “safe” is my “stuck.”

Houses in dreams can represent ourselves; houses in three-dimensional reality do, too. I learned that from my mother, who ran dream workshops and woke us before dawn on spring equinox mornings to ring bells and summon the sun. I have lived in my three-family Victorian house for nearly 22 years. Mom helped me with the down payment. Having constant tenants has enabled me to ignore the place unless a boiler went down. I never got to know the house, whom I’ve now named Cora, or really begin to imagine what she could be.

But fear has tentacles, especially old, unconscious fear.

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I left a couple of bags of corn chips sitting on the new granite kitchen countertop on the second floor. This past Thursday, I popped in to chat with Anthony, who is overseeing the renovation of two of Cora’s apartments.

“You don’t have any mice in the house, or they would have gotten into the chips,” said Anthony. “Or rats.”

I shivered. “Oh my god,” I said. “I had a dream about a rat in the house last night.”

There were two house dreams that night. First, I spotted a rat in the hollow behind one of the wrought-iron heating vents. Then, former tenants appeared in my driveway and shouted for my attention. When I stuck my head out the window, they wanted some money.

“I can’t help you anymore,” I called back. I shut the window and walked away.

Renovation began in January, and it’s been slow – which has timed well with my growing understanding of how I relate to Cora. I was meditating in May when fresh air blew in and I saw the pattern. Our childhood home was closed, and “I am still not inviting people in,” I thought. Worse, I recognized it was all somehow tied up in resentment at my mother for her insularity.

“Oh, Cate,” my heart said, from nowhere, like a closed fist opening up.