Breathing Underwater

In fifth grade I was invited to a school friend's birthday party.  I remember sitting in the car after school one day, seeing my friend's mom jump out of their car and talk to my mom for a minute.  When she slid back behind the steering wheel, Mom said that there would be a movie shown at the party and my friend's mom just wanted to make sure it was ok for me to see it.  Apparently it was ok because I went to the party.  The movie, Splash, is the only thing about the party that I remember.  Other than the old reel-to-reel films shown in school and the time Mom took my sister and I to see The Sound of Music at the public library, I'd never seen a movie before.  Any movie.  Ever.  And I haven't seen Splash since but I still recall scenes from it in vivid detail....Daryl Hannah as the mermaid in a lab tank, incompatible salination of the water causing her distress and making her tail flake and peel....love and vision prompting Tom Hanks to shed his known life on the beach and risk diving into the waves at the end, discovering not only companionship in life but that he could breathe in his new, underwater world.

Fast forward several years to my sophomore year of high school.  My brother had a Nintendo system our parents had given him.  We didn't have a TV so we played games on the computer monitor they'd gotten for the Nintendo.  I'm not sure what prompted it but we decided to rent a movie.  Dead Poets Society.  (The irony of that choice is not lost on me.)  We picked up the movie and a VCR (also rentable at that time) and headed home where we escaped to the basement to hook up the VCR and watch the movie on that computer monitor.  That is, after shutting up the house like we'd all died.  Blinds closed on all the windows.  Doors locked and deadbolts secured.  Every upstairs and outdoor light turned off.  No one could know we were watching a movie (was it a Saturday night? if so, then especially then).  No one should know we were even home.  Even the door from the garage to the kitchen was locked, a door no one could have reached unless they'd broken into the garage to begin with.  To have any chance of seeing the flicker of a screen, someone would've had to have parked, come along the side of the house, opened a tall gate, and snuck down to the middle of the lower level of the backyard in order to peer in through a single window....a venture likely to be unsuccessful because we'd pulled the blinds down.  None of those things....breaking into the house, sneaking around the property....would have been undertaken by the kind souls in our church.  Our ministers did have a key so the element of being surprised was certainly real, but they generally didn't come in the evenings.  Definitely not on a Saturday night.

Many watchings of Dead Poets Society (and other movies) later, we were old pros at the routine.  Go get the movie, come home and secure the house, steal away downstairs.  At the hint of the doorbell, the volume would be silenced.  The walls in that house were 10" thick and the front door a floor away, but there wouldn't be any taking chances.  I'm not sure what we thought would happen in the extraordinarily unlikely case that we were 'found out'.  One of my aunts was married to a man who wasn't in the church and they had a TV in their basement, we'd heard of others who had one in their closet, I dated a guy whose family actually went to the theater....something I did for the first time my senior year when my AP American Lit class went to see Huckleberry Finn during school hours.  And nothing bad happened.  But hide away we did.  Movies were not allowed.  And while my family walked the line on some things, that wasn't one of them.  At least, not publicly.

A few years later when we were moving towards leaving the church our leaving was a closely kept family secret until the very last minute.  You don't grow up in this group unscathed.  You certainly do not walk away from it without consequence.  My mom was adamant that she was leaving on her own terms, not being excommunicated, and my parents knew a number of people to whom that had happened.  The upheaval would be difficult enough...uprooting from the center of life-long social and cultural connections....choosing something that would automatically disrupt extended family ties for a long while and bring a swift end to friendships...  We did a lot of work ahead of time to try to mitigate some of the impact that leaving would bring, but you can't necessarily mitigate the relationship side of that kind of thing.

Over sushi downtown last weekend, a dear friend asked me what my life would be like if I'd stayed in the group.  Tears came to my eyes.  I found myself unable to even think such a thing.  When I was 19 I'd determined to leave no matter what, even if that had to happen before my parents were ready to leave.  I wasn't sure how that would play out, and I had some fears about how it would affect them if that were to be the order of how it happened, but I knew I was done.  I lived my entire life with that tension....being inside and trying desperately to live authentically but even as a child not completely buying into it.  If I'd stayed...I can't imagine.  I'd be utterly depressed, possibly suicidal.  You cannot have your spirit squashed the way mine was and survive.  Which is why I knew I had to get out.

I knew it would all be worth it.  So worth it.  Not without considerable costs, but gaining something invaluable.  Discovering that what I trusted to be true is actually true....that I can, in fact, breathe underwater.


©2015 Mindy Danylak