A home break-in made us safer. I wish it hadn’t.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
A story my mother loves to tell about me as a baby is the time I lost my security blanket during one of her dinner parties, interrupting the meal and spreading the guests out through the house to look for it—but not hard enough. My fit amplified. They all had to go home. My mother remembers where she found the blanket the next day—stuffed out of sight in a slat of my play shopping cart—when she took it out, washed it and used a pair of kitchen shears to cleanly slice it into fourths.
I don’t remember that dinner, but I do remember the blanket. It was soft and pink and yellow and blue. I loved to rub the nubs of its fabric between my thumb and forefinger. I also twirled my hair and sucked my thumb when I was little, and I can remember wishing there were a way to do all three at once.
Over the past couple months, our neighborhood has suffered a rash of break-ins. Our house was hit. My husband and I have been reevaluating our safety precautions, and I’ve noticed that what makes us safe isn’t always necessarily what makes us feel secure.
I had a million questions for the policeman who came over to fill out the police report. Obviously, we would be installing a home alarm and a motion detector for the baby’s room. What were his brand recommendations? What steps were being taken to hunt down the perpetrators? We had tracking software installed in my laptop, one of the things that was taken. Did they want us to contact the station if we received a location signal? And should we get a dog? We’d been talking about getting a dog for a while. But in his experience, were dogs proven to reduce the chances of a break-in?
The policeman didn’t dodge my questions. He didn’t really answer them, either. He kept reminding us that the break-ins were all nonviolent. That we had insurance. That the crimes were probably all being carried out by the same people. His bottom line seemed to be that yes, we’d been hit, but we probably wouldn’t be twice. He didn’t tell us not to get the dog or the motion detector, but they didn’t seem to be the point. The point boiled down to something much simpler: In exchange for knowing our vulnerabilities, we were less vulnerable. We felt insecure, but our safety rating had risen.
My husband and I weren’t naive. It’s not as though we’d been living in a world painted black and white only to wake up one day trapped inside a Technicolor nightmare where crime not only was possible, but could happen to us. Still, for weeks afterwards, I would catch myself emerging from daydreams with a hand pressed to my head, twirling a lock of my hair.
There’s a door in our house separating the living area from our bedroom and the baby’s. It has glass panels that a person could, with some effort, punch out and step through to the other side without opening the door. The first night after the break-in, my husband barred the door’s base with a mop handle. He’s from New Orleans, where superstition flows out the taps with the water. It’s flavored his Catholicism so that we can’t walk into a church without him running after me to dab me with holy water. He likes zodiac signs. He doesn’t like to kill spiders. And we don’t go to bed anymore without that mop handle wedged in the door.
I’m not superstitious, until I am. Thirty years of watching my mother knock on wood has put me in the habit of absently rapping tabletops and floorboards. Now I’m picking my husband’s up, too; they’ve become a thing I help out with, like the way he washes all of our laundry or how I clean both of our mugs in the sink. How we both now take turns with the mop handle.
It’s true that, before the break-in, I felt more secure. But am I safe? Last month I left my credit card behind at a bar. I lose my house keys, my driver’s license. My rings slip from my fingers as though constantly being pulled by a magnet.
I used to be worse, especially in places that gave me a false sense of security, like my hometown or my college town. When I met my husband, he was living in inner-city Baltimore, and with him I always felt very secure. Down the block, his friend never left the house without $20 cash in his pocket. He called it his “mug money.” He never got mugged, but he felt better having it on him.
In that same city, I had a yoga teacher who believed in spirit animals and had hers, a snowy owl, tattooed on her shoulder. She knew it was her spirit animal because she had meditated for a long time and it appeared to her. Her husband didn’t like meditating, but he did like tattoos, so she did it for him and found out his was a grizzly bear. It could, according to her, work like that. Their 6-year-old daughter loved meditating and had two spirit animals, a dolphin and a sea turtle. They had not tattooed her, yet.
My son likes turtles, too. From his army of stuffed animals, the favorite emerged in the form of a dopy, thin-necked reptile he sleeps with each night. It wasn’t even a toy that we bought for him, certainly not one of those we named and fleshed out with imaginative backstory. I’d completely forgotten we had it until my son found it stuffed in a nightstand, a good-luck charm for my first day of graduate school.
I’m not one for good-luck charms, until I am.
The least secure I’ve ever felt was in my role as a new mother. We had trouble feeding him as a newborn and came up with what was, in hindsight, nothing more than a desperate jujuist obstacle course. Every feeding cycle we would give him almost all his milk, then pace in laps with the stroller around the dining room table in time with the same Sam Cooke song he seemed to like one time, we think. Then present him with the rest of his milk. Then rock him to sleep if you’d followed every step exactly correctly and had not rushed; if he would not sleep, you had broken the charm.
In our neighborhood, the break-ins have died off. We never heard back from the police, so I’m sure the burglars just moved on to a different section of town. I believe the policeman and doubt they’ll come back. My son will never know any of this ever happened. It will be a blip of his young life cut out, vanished, made tacit.
When he asks me for a story from when he was little, I’ll tell him about how we paced the dining room with him for hours and hours. How we played him the same Sam Cooke song on loop like a couple of maniacs. How he lost his turtle one time (not yet, but it’s coming), and it threw the whole house into turmoil.
Until we found it, which we probably did, probably someplace impossible, like the back of the freezer.
And he went to bed with it every night, feeling absolutely, unconditionally secure.
@CitySprawlNVMag maintains a secure account on Twitter.
(March 2015)