No. 1 Naming the things that scare me. I became very self-conscious and and superstitious a little like you're not supposed to say it out loud.
No. 2 My son's vulnerability. It's challenging even just to say that he's vulnerable. I sort of choke on the word vulnerability. I used to have a dream, that I would hold my son's head and it would just sort of turn gelatinous in my hand, right? Like he's here, he has actual substance. Then suddenly the substance could just disappear.
No 3. The dark.
No 4. Mirrors in the dark.
No 5. Raising a white son as a queer person of color. So I didn't realize he was going to come out and be white. Super--- [phone] I'm brown like not super dark brown, but I'm fairly dark brown skin and his father is white and I just really didn't expect that he wouldn't be brown at all. You know, people would sort of see me as the nanny or, you know, they would ask these offensive questions like, oh, he looks so ethnic, like what are his parents? Like, literally, this is the town I live in.
No. 6. Kids ask all the right questions, you know, like, why are we different colors? Like mommy, your hair is short, and all of the people who have short hair that I know are boys. And it's so easy to just sort of let that moment go by and give a really easy answer and not for it to be totally OK for my son to be like, you know, why did that man just call you, sir? And for me to be like, well, cause, you know, for me in particular, like, it just doesn't like I'm not bothered by that. And he read me in that way. And we have to make the space for it.
No. 7, cockroaches.
No. 8 The thought of being buried alive or trapped in a small space. That fear is enacted anytime I have to pull off a jacket or I get claustrophobic. I used to live in Minnesota and I would have so many layers up there and sometimes just feel like I have to rip everything off right away.
No. 9. Tall pine trees. So we have been all over the place in Florida. I'm looking at two right now. Out the window. No. Yeah. And so they're so tall and they're gorgeous and they're beautiful. And you can watch them swaying in the breeze. But we also have hurricanes and afternoon thunderstorms. And now sometimes I'll just look out the window and they're just swaying back and forth. And then you can imagine what might happen if they just swayed a little too much and snapped and they do break. That happens.
No. 10. Human technology and progress. I don't really identify with so many technologies like the one that comes to mind most that I find most boggling, but I use everyday as the toilet, like in my world, I never would have invented a toilet.
My name is Anne Wolf, and these are 10 things that scare me.
My son, he doesn't have a lot of fears. He used to be scared, a little bit of shadows, which I think is -- a lot of kids are scared of shadows. And then he named them Ontini and Ontasma. He would say, you know, Ontini is on the wall over there. And then it was like, whatever. There's Ontini and Ontasma and he was totally over it.
