Idle Hands {21}

Somewhere at the end of September 2009

The moment the fork left my mouth, I knew I should have just spit out that bite of food and give up trying to get anything down my constricted throat. Shaking, I closed my hands around my glass of water, again, and chugged it trying to force anything down my throat. It was not working.

I started coughing. Dad started patting my back, more out of moral support than a life saving maneuver.

We were sitting in a restaurant for my uncle Dwight's birthday dinner. The only reason I was here was because I had a panic attack just thinking about not being around my dad. The attacks had increased in frequency and severity, something I didn't even think was possible. I had stopped driving, working, and had not re enrolled in school after the summer. The reason I could not stand being around anyone else, was because they either reacted to my panic or they just stared at me completely unable to reassure me by talking to me because they would stay silent.

Except Alex. He was not as good at talking me down from the anxiety like my dad, but at least it never phased Alex. But he had an actual job. My dad was his own boss. There was no one around to ask why his grown daughter was following him around all the time. So, I went with my dad. Everywhere. Except on the days that Alex took over babysitting duties.

Thus, here I was sitting with my grandmother, uncle, aunt, dad, and Marcia.

The entire time we had been here, I had been on the edge of an attack, and now I was starting to hyperventilate. I was not sure if anyone had told my aunt and uncle what was going on with me, because I remember them looking a bit confused when dad took a swig of water, stood, and ushered me out of my chair, excusing us as he walked me out the door.

I mean, what were my parents supposed to tell everyone? She bought a ticket for the crazy train?

The air was hotter outside than in, but the walls could not close in on me out here. Dad walked circles with me around the restaurant, trying to calm my building panic, but it was not working. He was completely unphased by my erratic behavior of obsessively checking my pulse and rambling about suffocating and choking.

Everyone finished dinner, though dad and I never went back inside, and everyone said goodbye in front of the restaurant.

Marcia, seeing my current state, took the backseat, and instructed me to ride in the front seat, with my dad driving. We had just pulled out of the parking lot and we were sitting at a red light when my panic attack peaked. The terror, that I had been keeping barely contained, surfaced in a flush that had me pouring sweat and frantically sucking air into my lungs, my heart exploding in my chest.

In the haze of my terror, as my dad is hitting the gas as the red light turned green, I grabbed the door handle and threw the passenger door open, at the same time, my other hand was slipping and fumbling as I tried to free myself of the seatbelt, because I had completely forgotten how to unlatch something that I had been operating since I was three.

"Mandie! What're you doing?!" Marcia tried to reach around from the backseat to put her arm on my jerking shoulder.

But dad was faster, slapping my hand out of the way and putting a death grip on my still buckled seatbelt to keep me from getting free. "You can NOT get out of a moving vehicle, Amanda! You need to focus and get a hold of yourself!"

It was enough to snap me out of my head for a moment, as dad was always nonreactive to my freak-outs. He hit the gas hard enough to slam my door back shut.

"I have to get outta here!"

"Not while the car's movin, you're not!" Dad didn't let go of my belt buckle until he pulled into the driveway, 8 minutes later.

It had been 8 excruciating minutes of Marcia and my dad trying and failing to reassure me, while I hyperventilated and yanked at my seat belt, spiraling in out of terror at being trapped in a moving car, the walls closing in and my throat closing up.

Once inside the house, laying prostate on the living room rug, I tried to get a grip on myself, but instead after several hours now of fighting this building panic and losing, I reached into my purse and pulled out the prescription bottle for the Klonopin, broke a pill in half and stuck one half under my tongue, dropping the other half back into the bottle.

My dad was sitting in his chair watching me, "That pill won't fix your problem."

I remember thinking that my dad was way too old school about some things.

"Then what's going to fix me, dad?" With a little bit of attitude, I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. We had already exhausted so many other options. The deep breathing, mediation, therapists, preacher, prayer, distraction, none of it was working.

He just raised his eyebrows at me, perplexed as to how to help his adult daughter overcome a kind of terror that overshadowed her childhood phobias.

Suddenly, my dad stood up, "Get up."

I was still laying flat on my back on the rug, "What?"

"Get. Up." He repeated it like he was talking to an idiot.

"Why?"

Sighing and shaking his head in frustration he walked out of the room saying, "Just get up," over his shoulder.

I knew better than to push anymore and did as he said, following him to the side door where he was pulling on his boots.

"Get your shoes on."

I sighed and grabbed my sneakers.

Following him onto the front porch, my anxiety could only handle so much suspense. "Dad, what are we doing?"

"Get in the truck."

Had it been anyone else, I would've stomped my foot and demanded an explanation before going any further, but I was more worried about mouthing off to my dad than I was the uncertainty of whatever it was we were going to do.

Riding in dad's truck wasn't quite the same as riding in the car. The windows in the truck were always rolled down, and the AC was never turned on. There was a permanent layer of filth and dirt and dust an inch thick on every surface in the cab. The seats had holes and every metal surface was rusting. There were Grizzly tobacco cans strewed all about along with water-warped progress reports for the farm and various tools and chains, and face masks everywhere and plastic grocery bags that he used to tie around his nasty boots if he had to walk into the house or run an errand with his farm boots on. It smelled like a chicken house and there was some chicken shit on the floor boards. We didn't wear seat belts in the truck. Just never had. The things were filthy and plastered in a permanent spot in their slots.

It was a filthy truck, but there was something comforting about rolled down windows and the smell of a chicken house. Strange the things we come to associate with comfort and security.

He'd been driving just a couple of minutes when he reached over and turned down the country radio, "We're going to the creek property."

The property was about a ten minute drive from the house. It was a plot of land sided up next to a creek that had been there forever. My history buff of a dad had discovered, to his delight, that there was an abundance of arrowheads and old Indian artifacts to be discovered on the property if one had the patience and a willingness to get dirty and dig a little.

After we bumped down the back road that spit us out onto the creek bank, we hoped out of the truck and dad walked around to the truck bed and pulled out two grabber sticks, basically a stick with a handle and a trigger at the top that would squeeze together the tong-like mouth at the other end, making it possible to pick up things without bending down repeatedly and wearing out your back.

Dad tossed me one of the grabbers. Fumbling with it, I nearly dropped it twice before catching it.

Looking out at the open field of red dirt, I could see they had just upturned it with the tractor and it was fluffy. A huge fluffy field of dirt. "How's this gonna help?"

"Idle hands..." He answered over his shoulder and headed out into the field leaving me standing there staring after him like an idiot, holding a device mostly utilized by the senior citizen portion of the population. He did not finish the rest of the sentence because he knew I could finish it on my own.

Idle hands are the Devil's workshop.

Dad had always said that, he had just recently started increasing the frequency with which he said it. According to his theory, I was too much in my head and not enough on earth. So, I had too much time to be in my mind fixating on my phobias and fear. Here I was overwhelmed and unable to handle the most simple of everyday mundane stress without feeling like my mind would snap, and Dad was telling me I needed more to occupy myself with.

Inwardly I rolled my eyes, because I was too chicken to let Dad catch me in the act.

Realizing I was not behind him, Dad turned to holler at me, "Ey! We ain't leavin here til you find somethin!" And he jabbed his forehead with his index finger twice, his signal to me to get out of my head.

I dragged my feet as I walked my shaking self out into the field. Aimlessly, I dug into the dirt with the toe of my sneaker, more rearranging the dirt than actually looking for anything, trying not to let the overwhelming sensations in body take over my focus. But trying to focus on anything besides the tightness in my chest and the difficulty to swallow was an impossible task, it's why I was in this predicament to begin with. The thoughts in my head were no longer my own.

They belonged to fear.

Dad made some small talk as he was kicking the red dirt with his boot, kicking up dust, and swatting it out of the air as he bent to examine an interesting rock here and there.

Eventually, the Klonopin started to kick in and I was able to focus a little more on digging in the dirt that the sensatios in my body, albeit I was in a pharmecuetical haze.

After a little while of sifting through the dirt, staying in close proximity to each other, dad sighed and asked me a question. "Did I ever tell you bout my first panic attack?"

After a moment of thinking, I could recall nothing. Giving him a sideways look, I shook my head.

"My first job as a welder was at that factory in my early twenties. There were these big metal pipes that would channel the heat and smoke out of the building."

Dad paused to dig in the dirt with the toe of his boot. "There were maintenance repairs that had to be done inside the pipes periodically and I was the only welder who could fit down into the pipes. They would shut the equipment off before lowering me down into the pipes, but OSHA would've had a conniption fit had they known what was going on." Dad shook his head.

"Well, this one time, they lowered me down into a pipe to do a repair I'd done countless times before. Only this time..." Dad stopped talking and I looked up from my mindless digging. He was giving me a look.

He continued, "Only this time, the equipment wasn't turned off."

My eyes grew wide and my dad nodded. "They pulled me out before the heat got to me, and I was fine," Dad paused. "Physically."

"What coulda happened messed with my head. I couldn't stop replaying it in my head. If they hadn't gotten me out in time, your brother woulda been an only child."

Dad knelt down to look at something in the dirt and then looked up at me. "I went home early from work that day. I was really shook up. My chest was tight. And I kept havin these episodes where I felt like I was suffocatin and my heart would race. But I didn't tell anyone about 'em. Back then, that's not something you went around telling other folks. I didn't know what was wrong with me." Dad stood back up, "But I knew I tweren't okay." He tapped his forehead.

"That evening, momma and daddy came up to the house to see me." Dad paused.

My dad hadn't mentioned PawPaw around me since after the funeral. And I remembered in this moment, that even though I was here, desperately trying to wrestle my life back from the grips of this terror, my dad was still just a human, figuring out how to live without his dad.

He continued. "I had myself worked up into a state when they got there. I told daddy all about what had happened and he listened to me go on and on and on. I was stuck up here," Dad tapped his forehead. "I was stuck in that cage. Obsessin over what might've happened."

"Daddy was looking at me, with his forehead scrunched up, like he was missing something in my story. You've got to remember your PawPaw was in the middle of combat during World War 2. He had to learn how to handle fear. So he stopped me and asked me, 'But did you die?'"

Dad looked at me the way he had looked at PawPaw, with his forehead creasing, confused, "And I said, 'Well, no daddy.'"

"He asked me, 'Then what's the problem?'"

Dad didn't say anything else.

I didn't say anything either and went on aimlessly toeing the dirt.

I was tossing a dud back to the ground when Dad looked at me sideways, and raised his eyebrows, "Do I need to explain the moral of that story?"

"No, I get it."

"Good," he narrowed his eyes at me and jabbed his forehead with his finger, "Stay outta here."