Poisoned Secrets, Part 2

     The second of my two stories for The Hearth's storytelling event, on the theme of family secrets, was about another secret from my childhood. (See last week's post for the first story.) In this story I am a junior at Sandy Springs High School, in Sandy Springs, Georgia, and am taking a political science class from a teacher named Mrs. Douglas—Julie Douglas, as I came to call her.

    One day Mrs. Douglas asked to see me after class. We stood in the hall next to the closed classroom door, and she said, "Do you ever dream?"

    It was a strange question, but as it happened, I had had a particularly vivid dream the night before, a dream with a snake in it. When I told the dream to Mrs. Douglas, she became very excited.

    "You have had an initiation dream," she said. "The snake is a symbol of initiation." She didn't specify exactly an initiation into what, and I don't remember what she said after that, but the upshot was that I felt I was a part of something special and important and that Julie Douglas would be my guide.

    From that day on, I often dropped by her classroom after school for esoteric conversations about symbols and myths and the unconscious mind. And if I had had a strong dream, I would ask her to interpret it for me.

    It was all more psychic than cultic, mostly just Julie Douglas expanding the boundaries of my intellect, a kind of Jungian exploration of the unconscious. She recommended books for me to read: The Glass Bead Game, Siddhartha, Jung and Hawthorne and Joseph Campbell. I was both fascinated by the intellectual expansion and flattered by the special attention.

    But also some vague fear that no one would understand made me keep the whole thing a secret.

    Except for my diary. 

    I was writing about it in my diary, which was all right because diaries are secret, right? What goes in a diary belongs only to the writer, so in my diary, I was freely exploring the ideas Julie Douglas stimulated and recording our, if not secret at least private, meetings.

    One day I came home from school to face my mother's fury. She had read my diary, and she was furious with Julie Douglas.

    I still don't know what made my mother betray trust and read my diary. I don't know if she just picked it up idly and stumbled across the pages abut Julie Douglas or if some suspicion caused her to seek out the diary for confirmation.

    And I didn't understand why she was so angry. She wasn't normally an angry person. I think maybe what she read scared her. Maybe it sounded like I was joining a cult. Maybe she just didn't understand Jungian thought. Maybe it sounded psychically dangerous or religiously threatening. Whatever the reason she was angry enough to say she was going to go straight to the school principal and tell him what Julie Douglas was doing.

    I was terrified. Julie was my friend, my mentor, my teacher—and a very good political science teacher, too. I was terrified of being the cause of her being fired. I sobbed in front of my mother. I begged her not to reveal any of this. As startling as it is to remember, I got down on my knees to beg my mother not to do what she threatened.

    My mother didn't promise me anything, and I went to my room in tears and fear. In the end, she didn't do anything, either, or, if she did, nothing came of it. Julie wasn't fired, and neither my mother nor I mentioned the incident again. But I no longer met Julie after class for those wonderful discussions. And I had to interpret my dreams myself from then on. 

    Camp Highland (which I wrote about last week) and Julie Douglas were episodes in my life more than half a century ago. Now, at the remove of so many years, I can understand my mother's fear at discovering her teenage daughter's secret involvement in strange conversations with her teacher, and I can forgive her for her reaction. And perhaps I can also forgive the little girl at Camp Highland for her shameful secret of self-harm, too, because I understand now the psychology behind her actions.