Trap Mirror

by Lee Price

There was a television show, popular in the 1990s, where children gathered around a campfire and provoked one another with spooky stories. In one episode, the spooky story goes like this: a nice girl’s archaeologist parents, off on a dig for the summer, leave her with a cruel cousin who bullies her into spending the night in the abandoned house next door. The title of the show, a question: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

My younger sister and I were not allowed to watch this show.

“Anti-Christian,” our mother said. Our father agreed.

We watched it anyway.

This is the episode where a nice girl goes into the abandoned house next door at nightfall and encounters a mirror. The ghost that lives inside is, at first, all horror: a silent girl, her face washed in shadows, her black eyes fixed in a dark stare. Backward, scrawling letters appear on the wall: HELP ME. The specter of this child aswim in a lookingglass’s black liminal space was so striking, so specific, the shot became archetypal for a legion of ‘80s kids who would forever associate mirrors with the macabre.

For years after watching this episode, I could not so much as glance at a mirror in the dark. When I found myself alone in dim lighting before a reflective surface, I could only look for so long before my heart went skittish in my chest and I was taking shallow breaths, thinking of portals.

To be reared by a mother with borderline personality disorder is to come up spectral in a house of mirrors. To bounce and fracture. To be thrown back, unabsorbed. It’s a mental health condition defined by an empty sense of self, frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, and emotional volatility. There are only two options: diffuse into nothing or reflect and be made grotesque.

The terror of this particular episode is front-loaded. The jolt of that first ghastly meeting gives way to a question, and the viewer’s fear loosens, reveals a mystery to be solved. Who is this phantom, and what help does she need? The ghost child eventually seeps from behind the glass, her face a diving white owl, noiseless in the haunted room. Cornered, the living girl caves to the floor, and the ghost child stretches a pale arm forward. A locket glints in her white hand—open,  faded photographs from each golden side. A girl and a mother. The living girl trembles with understanding—she recognizes her cousin’s now-frail, lifelong nanny. The living girl recalls gossip about the old woman being driven mad, decades back, by “the ghost next door.” A revelation—the identical locket the nanny wears, pinned to her sweater. In the next scene, the living girl drags the mother back to the site of her life’s greatest shame, into the room where her forsaken daughter met death. The living girl thrusts the mother before the mirror to see her daughter, the ghost child who steps from the mirror yet again. Reunited, they clasp hands, step back into the reflection, and vanish.

Even now, in front of mirrors I stay braced for a ghost to reach out, step through, and pull me into her own world of traps and glass. Afraid of the dark.

The ghost girl herself never scared me. She was harmless. But that mirror was not. The terror, for me, was in the trick of it. The promise of reflection that bore another, more sinister suggestion about the black expanse of a person’s worst failures, bounced back. Of a truer world that stirred beneath, bending, duplicating itself into a tumorous misshape of what you held closest to your heart. Considering all this, my small self felt vindicated by my dread. Like I was keyed into something essential when I pressed my fingers to a mirror, wondering at the depth of its gaze.

My mother didn’t seek help until I was a teenager, which began a procession of misdiagnosis. Chronic depression. Major depressive disorder. Bipolar disorder. Post-traumatic stress. None of them were exactly wrong; they all bore the weight of some tenant of her particular instability. But none got it all right, and the medications that always followed, just placebos of hope that begat disappointment. And eventually, a weary sense that what once felt a little broken had settled into disrepair, threatened to rot. That she could never be fixed.

To be fair, borderline personality disorder is an evasive state of being and commonly misdiagnosed. Hallmarked by intensity. To be loved by a person with this disorder is to be worshipped and despised. Mothers afflicted with it struggle to see their children as anything more than mirrors, elaborate reflections of their own elusive selves. The child of a borderline mother is both deity and devil. Salvation and ruin. A spectacular breakdown led to the correct diagnosis. She heard dead people screaming in the river behind our house, saw them staring from the woods. She sliced at herself and told me about it. She left the house in the night’s purple hours to rip her car fast around backroads, call friends, and beg them to just let her crash. That’s what it took for her shadow to take on just the right amount of light for the professionals to catch it, tie the line of her suffering to the right dock of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Children of borderlines are born into waters that swell way above their heads, swimming deep  through choppy storms that leave them worn out and spent. We spend the rest of our lives convincing ourselves that the exhaustion, the stress-induced illnesses, the stomachaches, and the migraines are born of our own neurotic natures.

It is a strange thing, to see the knot of your life untangled with words. To learn that it has been studied, understood. To read books on a subject and see what you thought to be private mysteries solved, reduced to text. To read that children of these mothers go numb to terror so as to survive the feeling of being emotionally devoured and think: yes.

Later in the episode, the girl and her cruel cousin return to the abandoned house during waking hours to scrub the pleas the ghost girl has written all over the walls. HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME scratched out, grotesque and backward, all over the room. The mirror flashes to reveal a mirage of toys, and the cruel cousin is baited, hooked, and pulled through the glass as the ghost girl steps out. It terrified me to watch that boundary between the real and the phantom world breach, as if reality itself was an unknowable thing. As if any moment might collapse and give way to a ghastly underworld.

The exact feel of this fear, the way it sits inside my body: the same weight, shape, and texture as the feathery thing that stirs when I swim deep waters. Floating at the top, the water’s surface bouncing back the sky, I imagine the ombre of depth and panic at the thought of aqua fading to green fading to navy that settles to black. The hush of such power, the infinity of darkness aswim in its deep.

But in my youngest years, the origin of it was evasive and kept me confused. Putting my hands around what, exactly, lurked around beneath the dread felt risky and impossible. But I would glance at my mother sometimes, caught in the tides of her big moods, and the sensation of it would come in like a stab. Daring me to look longer, to try and catch a shadow in the night.

We lived in rural North Carolina, the flattest part of the piney state, where muddled rivers and streams wind like copperheads among the crops: tobacco, cotton, soy. Everyone we knew also knew the good Lord in Heaven and His son, Jesus Christ, and attended church services of some fiery denomination at least twice a week. It was the 1980s and ‘90s, that time in America when child abductions and Satanic cults were steadily probed by sensationalist news programs. Our mother made us watch these programs so that we could spot the peril of white vans, helmed by yellow-toothed strangers, sliding up beside us on a bright street.

In this way we were made to behold the most vivid of nightmares. When it came to our entertainment options, overt sex, drugs, and children with bad attitudes were forbidden to us. But my mother loved Hitchcock—she showed us The Birds first. I saw Psycho when I was ten, Vertigo at the tender age of eight. It was the kind of stunning inconsistency in parenting that, fittingly, mirrors the shaky sensation of navigating a borderline parent. But the swirling staircases, bloodied shower walls, and murder birds of those films never chilled me like that mirror from Are You Afraid of the Dark?

In my favorite memory of my mother I am eight, nine, or ten years old in the hot summertime mountains. We were on vacation. There was a pizza parlor on the grounds with a pinball machine based on a television show we were allowed to watch, because it is old and my mother loved it in her youth. The Twilight Zone.

“Did y’all know I’m good at pinball?” she asked me and my sister. Our faces were slick with grease from the pepperoni, our tongues fuzzed with sugary drink. We shook our heads; we had no idea. She slid me a bill so I could run and fetch her some change while she jangled her crushed ice. I ran back with a cup of quarters and pulled up a stool while she dropped the first one in the slot. Put her hands on either side of the machine and leaned down, her chest pushing forward, as if starting a race. We watched her for hours, expertly knocking the ball, racking up points, clanging the cup of quarters like a tambourine. She’s a pinball wizard.

But in the heat of that bright afternoon, we three stood galvanized by the noises, the lights, the things beneath the glass that spun around. My sister and I, holding our relentless mother with our little gaze. Her pinging and pinging the ball, sending up flashes of light. The balls bouncing and refracting. The dazzling optics and noise, the brilliance springing off of her eyes. The sight of her from below, reflected up in the long glass pane encasing the game. Her glory, the revelation of our mother, throwing herself forth then bouncing back, and back, and back.

She always told me I was smart, told my sister she was pretty. When my brother came along, seven years into my own life, she said he was precious. She was thirty years old when she gave birth to him, her last child.

“But I prayed for you, exactly you, and you came to me special.” She said this to me once, and it felt like a plea.

When I think of her anger in those early years of my life, I hear glass break. Feel our shaking house, the slamming doors and cabinets and objects against walls. How her whole face opens, and her mouth is a dark flying bat, screeching, sour fangs gnashing at my face. The time she screamed at me, as a toddler, to shut up and get lost. The time she screamed at my sister and 

me that we were stupid idiots for doing such a bad job recording a greeting for the family’s answering machine. The occasional sting of her palm on my face, the burn that rose from it as she growled out a warning, an assurance that she would always know how to deal with a smart-mouth like mine.

There was always the crashing and breaking and then the crying. The receding into sleep. Then apologies delivered in the language of perfect, motherly remorse. “Mama’s sorry, mama’s so sorry,” she wept into our hair. “Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I’m a bad mommy.”

I want to explain—she was a good mommy, most of the time. She was fun and bright and laughing in a way the other mothers, the meeker women who raised my friends, never were. She shone, prone to adventure with a roaring sense of fun. And of course we loved our vivid, blonde mother who cackled easy and loud.

But the look in her eye when her howls rose from shadow, not light. When she went bad and then said sorry, later. Little mirrors that menaced another meaning entirely. Daring us to harbor a shred of anger, or a tatter of blame. Prisms by which she beheld her daughters, angled into shapes of her own benevolence, or wrath. She always made us hold her gaze, a demand for atonement. And a glimpse through the looking glass, a reminder that beneath her eyes made shiny by tears, the gloaming realm remained.

The moons of sadness rose early in my life, sliding in and casting shadows, inducing eclipse. I kept a diary, one of those journals with a little plastic lock. I was six years old and I felt worse than made sense. Mama hates me. I hate myself. I wrote it, I thought it, I carved it into the desk in my bedroom. Things were not bad at our house, the way I knew they were bad for some children. But there was a kind of emotional violence in the vibrations of the house when she walked. Tremors that gave away her mood, the tension in her gait announcing itself with each step. And it changed, suddenly, all the time.

When my mother read my diary, she did not come to me. She did not leave it where I left it, face down on the bathroom sink. She wrote an entry in it herself and left it closed on the kitchen table for me to find.

It makes me so sad you feel that way.

I have tried my best to be a good mommy to you.

This hurts my heart.

A wall of fear rushed up my guts to my tongue. I panted with terror hearing her move around, making noise in her bedroom. Thinking of her, back there, knowing. I was braced for storms of fire, waiting to be seared by hot maternal rage. Instead when we spoke, she gave me ice, a chill of questions. What happened? Did anyone else know I felt this way? There were special doctors for sad children who couldn’t cheer up, she threatened, a cold hand clamping down on my chest. What was so wrong anyhow? I had so much more than most children in the world even knew to imagine—dance lessons, birthday parties, all the books my dumb little heart ever wanted to read. In what way had I not been indulged? How could I possibly be broken—a forlorn, misty girl—when I was being reared with such intensity, such light? 

Now I can fathom it from her end. Finding the diary, I imagine an amused smirk on her face, expectant. Happy to read about my little life. Then the blades of my letters, rising up ghastly in my child’s scratch, presented as horror: cries for help.

But depression is just rage collapsed. Inevitably, the ghost of my sadness cracked the mirror and ran, screaming, out into the world. The tempest of my anger was both a reflection of her fury and a manifestation of my own, forbidden feelings. I absorbed all that ferocity from my mother, and like a good mirror I threw it back, brighter. I just never took aim at her.

I became mean. Addicted to fury. Discovered the effigy of power by rage. As I grew older, my mouth became a weapon. My tongue whetted to a spike. All of my language, gone nuclear with fury. I could not so much as raise my tone to her. But I was cruel to other people who loved me. To my sister, to my father. To some men who might have deserved it and a few who certainly did not. In my confusion I called this awful power my gift. My greatest sin has been my fury, and I have kneeled in its wreckage, been dragged to my knees in shame.

I joined a profession of wrathful people when I became an attorney. My mother had taken the LSAT herself once, harbored a longing for the miserable career I struggle to not regret. I think of our lives in mirror this way; both of us at twenty-three, bouncing in opposite directions. Me being swept up in the avalanche of student debt, big city life, career moves. Her body swelling full with mine, becoming a mother, starting my life.

My story reflected hers again, in my thirties, when I took up with a man whose wrath mirrored my own. Those hardest, scariest years. It brought me to the same shore of despair where she nearly drowned when I was a teen. But I slaughtered my rage before it slayed me. In a midtown Manhattan office suite, I spent years paying to scream and beat at foam objects 

with bats, fists, rackets. While a therapist made me look her in the eyes. After the breaking and then the crying I would ride the train home, stare in the bathroom mirror. The great crack of relief at the sight of my own reflection, excised and changed. No longer splintered into angry shards, no longer grotesque.

The ghost girl, in the television show, was always unable to speak, had died after being abandoned by her mother. Who claimed it was a mistake, mere oversight, to have not acknowledged her only child was missing for weeks. On discovering her daughter’s demise, the mother is destroyed. Her own life transformed into a distortion of the one she once had. Each of her scenes is a performance of histrionic despair.

“All I ever wanted to be was a mommy,” my mother said often. “And I always knew it.” She told a story, sometimes, of being twenty-five years old and mired in children: myself a toddler, with my newborn sister on her breast. “I was rocking my baby, watching Miss America. And all those girls were my age, wearing crowns and dresses, dancing on the stage. I remember just looking down at my babies and thinking: This is what makes me happy.”

My mother and I are more fortunate than our television counterparts. She did not leave me alone to catch my death, and I did not become a ghost. But there is a pane of trauma that stretches between us, reflects and refracts a lifetime of our love and our hurt. So I stay vigilant and refrain from settling my stare down the long hall of her mirrors, the view of myself growing smaller, an infinite recession of my reflection. To be reared by a borderline mother is to come up spectral, lest you surrender to the trap. To find comfort in the skin of reflections, delineations, boundaries. To be paid excruciating attention and suffer profound neglect. A ghost in the glass, an angelic projection. To know mother as a mirror, one that works both ways. That absorbs you to the marrow, then flings you back out.

It has been decades since I first saw that episode of the show that inquired Are You Afraid of the Dark? Now, when I find myself alone before glass in the dark, I stare directly into the shadow. Look for as long as I want. Bastioned, my steely heart thumps. Start considering what may ripple beneath. Rustle up the old bird of my girlhood, bait it with black crumbs of thought. About mothers, and ghosts, and mirrors that can rip open the past, leave it gaping like a wound. The old pain of it throbbing through the surface, I can rouse the feathered dread. Make it rise, peck at my throat. Remind me that I remain but a trick of smoke and mirrors. A revenant of my mother’s light.

Published December 11th, 2022