How to Find the Courage You Lost Back Then

Thirty years ago, a good friend invited me to join her extended family on their annual vacation. I’d attended the previous year and enjoyed myself, so I said yes again and flew out to meet everyone at the large house they’d rented for a week in one of the southeastern desert states. My friend, her parents, her two brothers and their spouses and children all arrived. We shouted greetings, hugged, and shared life updates.

Based on my experience the previous year, I had expectations. There would be good-natured (but cutthroat) Uno games, laughter, deep talks, fun outings—and we did have some of that. Or maybe we had a lot of that. If we did, I don’t remember those parts, because the day we were all packing up to leave, something else happened that commandeered my memories of the trip. Over the years, whenever I thought about what happened then, my mind would shut off and tell me to move on, which I did. Until recently.

Here's what happened back then. My friend’s brother and his wife and their kids attended the family gathering. One of their kids was a boy who (according to my memory) was about eight years old. He seemed quiet and self-conscious, even with his immediate family. If I thought about it at the time, I probably just considered him to be introverted.

On the final day of the vacation, most of the us were busy in the main living area—scanning for final items to pack, zipping luggage, checking airline tickets—when the boy’s mother started yelling.

The boy stood in the hallway between the main room and the front door, his back to those of us puttering in the living room. His mother yelled, and then she got mean. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed her temper, but she escalated, went over the top. She didn’t touch the boy, but the things she said and the way she said them, the contempt in her voice for her child, cut the air.

The other adults in the room, all of us, froze. The boy’s father remained motionless in the doorway to the kitchen as the boy’s mother raged on and on, louder, meaner, wilder. The boy just stood there, three short feet away from her, taking it, the rest of us in the room a passive tableau that could have been titled How Not to Champion a Child.

During the incident, I had the distinct impression that the dynamic between mother and son was not playing out for the first time—not at all for the first time. I don’t remember exactly how the scene ended, but it for sure wasn’t by anyone going to the child’s rescue. The mother may have finished her scathing rant and wandered back into the bedroom to finish packing. Maybe the boy slid off to a bathroom to tremble in despair. I don’t know.

I do know, and I knew even while it was happening, that I didn’t do anything to help the boy. I would swear (I’ve been over and over this in my mind, but I can’t get an exact read on it) there was a sword involved (a play sword? an ornamental sword from the wall?) and the mother was brandishing it. There was something that frightening about those vicious moments. My brain has been in a wrestling match with that entire experience for decades by now. What really happened? And why didn’t I do anything?

When I try to tune in to my state of mind at the time the incident happened, I come up with something like this as my running thoughts back then: Whoa. That’s an intense tone of voice. But she’s the mom, so why is she talking to him like that? He’s just a little kid. And why isn’t the dad doing anything? Or the grandparents? I’m only a guest here. Should I do something? Wait. Maybe the mom is finally winding down…

And then it was over. Taxis arrived. Luggage disappeared into car trunks. Final hugs in a blur. I left for the airport—angered, ashamed, and relieved to be gone.

The incident with the boy occurred so long ago, and I lost touch with that family soon afterward, but the scar of my passivity remained.

===

Fast-forward three decades to a recent early morning when I lay dreaming in my bed—dreaming yet another dream of dire circumstances, life-or-death choices, and the knife edge of fear.

A significant portion of my psyche continues to grapple with the reverberations of shock, grief, and adaptation required by the COVID pandemic and other global events of the past few years, during which, things changed. All the detonated pieces of me are still trying to coagulate. My logical mind registers the absence of immediate danger, but my body and my dreams continue to process at deeper levels. As unconscious and semiconscious pieces work to heal and unite, unfinished business catches in the net they drag across my internal landscape. One of the pieces caught in the strands is a boy who stands in silence as his mother eviscerates him—and the roomful of adults who let it happen.

I lay dreaming.

I am on that vacation in the Southwestern desert. The boy appears in the hallway, small and plump, facing his mother. He’s right here, stoic and immobile, shoulders slack, expecting nothing. His mother unsheathes and raises a sword in an arc, the intent to slice and maim bold on her furious face. The hard swish of the sword’s rise above her head turns everything hyper-real. I watch her arm muscles shift. The tip of the sword touches the ceiling. I inhale a sharp gulp of fear, anticipating the downward arc.

And I step forward.

I take ten steps to cross the room and slide between the boy and the sword.

At this point in the dream, I become aware that I am dreaming. As the dream continues, a conscious sliver of my mind, curious and attentive, observes the story as it unfolds, nudges the dream this way and that.

When I insert myself between the sword and the boy, I reach back to touch the boy’s upper arm. I want to know for sure where he is in relation to the sword. I want to measure his animation. He’s frozen, unchanged, unresponsive. I shuffle backward, a test with my feet. The boy shuffles back too. It’s enough. By the time the mother registers shock at my intervention and swings the heavy sword with a cry of frustration, the boy and I have shuffled backward out of reach. We turn and run.

“Get to your aunt’s room,” I urge the boy. He half-runs, half-falls down the short flight of stairs to the back hallway. I follow, hot on his heels.

With the bedroom door closed and locked behind us, I shove a small dresser against the door and take out my phone to call the police. I tell the 911 operator what happened, what is still happening, trying to keep my voice calm and steady, for the boy’s sake. He lifts his head and blinks at me, eyes enormous, mouth open, like he can’t fathom what I’m doing.

We wait there, sitting side by side on the twin bed, the 911 operator keeping us company. Finally, a siren sounds in the distance and grows near, louder, finally undeniably here. At the distant sound of a sharp knock on the front door of the house, certain and real, and an unfamiliar man’s deep voice, the boy tilts sideways to press tight against my arm and lay his head on my shoulder.

The dream goes on. Long, long dream. The story of me and the boy in the dreamworld continues for hours, days, months—long into that alternate outcome. The boy’s mother, in handcuffs in the back of a police car, screams as the cops usher me and the boy out of the rented vacation house. The boy’s family rallies, late. Messy repercussions ensue. The void of lost friendships.

I stay with the boy to the end, accompany him on the plane home. I abide with him for years, until I know he is really safe in his body and in his soul, until I know the adults around him have earned or re-earned his trust (not including his mother, who was allowed to be near him only under social services supervision).

We stuck with it, the boy and I, through years of scrubbing and reinvention and repair.

He grew up. He married a woman who shared his deep well of gentleness with their children.

===

What interests me is how healed that dream made me feel, how healed it made me.

The dream somehow allowed parts of my psyche to shift such that I became newly aware of experiences I’d had since the incident with the boy—not dream experiences, but real experiences in which I wasn’t passive. Rewriting the incident in my dream reconnected me with a wider context of my life and softened my self-judgment until I remembered I am more than my regret.

“The rush of information came running in like a waterfall, filling me with the thought that hatred has a poor shelf life, but that hope and love can limp along together forever.”
– Craig Johnson

For example, I remembered that I weathered an incident with a man I knew who tended to express strong ideas about what his son should do in certain situations, sometimes including situations where the son had a right to make his own decisions. One day, when the son was about fourteen, such a situation arose, and I was there. The father built up a head of steam, frustrated by his son’s push-back. The father began to vent angrily, using a harsh, contemptuous tone of voice, belittling the son in an attempt to get him to comply. Deflated, the son turned and started up the staircase. The father escalated to an angrier voice.

Just as I took a step forward to intervene, the son, a slight and easygoing boy whom I’d never seen challenge his father’s anger, turned back to face his father, and said, simply, “No,” meaning it. I could swear I saw his heart beating out of his chest. The son held his father’s gaze for a weighted moment, then continued up to his room.

The father, exasperated and fuming, took himself outside for a walk (bless him).

I ventured up the stairs and knocked on the son’s open bedroom door. “Hey,” I said.

He stood with his back to the doorway, as if he’d walked into his room and shut off, head down, adrift.

I circled around. The look of devastation on the son’s face broke me.

“You know what?” I said. “Your father has unresolved issues from his past, and they come out sideways when he’s triggered. Those are his responsibility to deal with, not yours, and it’s not fair for him to treat you the way he did. What happened down there was not your fault.”

The son lifted his head to meet my eyes. “Really?” he said, in a tiny, almost not-there voice, as if he couldn’t believe my statement, as if he’d totally thought his father’s anger was deserved.

“Really,” I said. “And for you to express your own opinion and say no when it went against your father’s opinion was really brave. Your opinion counts. Good job, buddy.”

He shook as he began to cry with relief.

===

I’ve remembered other incidents as well since that dream about the incident from thirty years ago, other times when I stood up for a child (or for an adult) being treated unfairly, irresponsibly, cruelly, and who, for whatever reason, couldn’t protect themselves.

I have called the cops to protect a child. I have put myself between an adult’s anger and a child. For real. More than once.

My dream of what my psyche wished had happened on that vacation with the boy and his mother reminded me that I not only can dream a better dream—a dream of courageously moving beyond my own fears enough to assist someone else in their awful moment—I did do that, I have done that. And I can learn to do it more, even if this ability and willingness to be a champion takes a long time to develop and requires courage I don’t think I have.

Rewriting our past failures of courage is not only possible—it’s essential. Go back in your daydreams to a time when you didn’t stand up for someone or for something you believed in, but you wish you had. Dream the outcome you wish could have happened. Feel and live inside the dream until your todays unfold with more of your courage intact and poised for action.

Every time we dream something better and take action in the present, we help someone else a little more, and we heal a little more of ourselves.

===

Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more. She also writes nonfiction for quiet people as author Grace Kerina.

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