Here’s a hammer - confront your fears

When I was in the second grade, I joined a recess support group for the children of divorced parents called Banana Splits.

By then I had spoken to a number of counselors about my parents’ divorce, and I was under the extremely healthy and mature impression that it was absolutely for the best, thank you very much. When it came to Banana Splits, I was only in attendance because they served actual banana splits at every meeting.

At the first meeting the group’s leaders, a team of 20-something women with sleek bobbed haircuts – no doubt completing community service hours for a local sorority – asked us each to write down something we were afraid of and something we wanted, on two separate pieces of red construction paper. The well-adjusted 8-year-old I was neatly penned, “complete and total loneliness” on one piece. On the other I wrote, “trip to MGM studios.”

Weeks went by and the pieces of paper sat on a shelf in separate, decorative cardboard boxes. At the last meeting of Banana Splits, the leaders gave each of us turns with an actual hammer and told us to smash the “fear” box in a parking lot behind the playground, where the well-adjusted children played hopscotch and four square. (I still don’t know what became of the “want” box.)

I took a swing at the box like everyone else but was largely skeptical. I knew exactly what I was doing: hitting a cardboard box with a hammer. I wasn’t actually destroying any fears. I wasn’t even strong enough to really destroy the box. It reminded me of my one and only experience at Bible camp, and my repeatedly raised hand demanding the teenagers in charge please explain more logically how a “miracle” worked. (In retrospect, I think I would have accepted “magic,” but they never came up with that.)

All I’d initially wanted from Banana Splits was free ice cream and maybe some acting practice whining and mimicking the children of divorced parents I saw on television. But instead, I found myself standing in a parking lot with a hammer experiencing for the first time the deep sinking realization that I had fears, and they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

And now I’m on the cusp of graduating college. I’m staring adulthood square in the face and it seems my fears, which were pushed aside for four years by Aver’s boxes and textbooks, spent that time pumping a lot of iron and rapidly breeding with one another. Uh ... where’s that hammer?

Actively “confronting your fears” is something that exists exclusively in the realm of inspirational posters with pictures of people jumping off waterfalls in the jungle. Day to day, it’s hard to squeeze in between homework and the grocery. But maybe the bobbed squad wasn’t all wrong back at Banana Splits. They got us to bring our fears to the surface and be open about them, after all. And maybe being open and sharing them with the people we’re close to is all we really can do.

That, and not turning down free ice cream when it’s up for grabs.