When I had just recently learned to walk, I was in the kitchen, “helping” my mom with dinner. She opened the oven and pulled the baking rack out a bit to remove the pizza stone. I’d seen her do this before. I knew what the next step was. I reached out my little hands to push the rack back in and burned myself. At least, that’s how my mom tells this story. I have no memory of it, other than the flinch I feel when I remove something from the oven still to this day.
As a joke, my dad used to scoop my sister and I up and pretend he was going to toss us into the preheated oven whenever he was cooking. He’d open the oven door all the way and pick us up, “Ok! Time to make some dinner! Yum – roast Carlisle!” We would giggle and scream, but for some reason I can recall a real heat that came from the oven. The yellow-orange light and the red metal tube, the rumble from the back of the yawning maw of the oven struck fear in my child’s heart.
When I was old enough to start being allowed to cook on my own (or even simply boil water to make sweet tea), I would sometimes use an oven mitt to move pots around on the stove. The handles are covered in black plastic; they would never reach a temperature to burn me. If I was pouring boiling water into a pitcher or a cup, I’d wear an oven mitt. My parents teased me about this, but I refused to take anything out of the oven without a full oven mitt. A flimsy pot holder would not do. How would that protect my hands?
I was in college when my mom told me the story of me burning my hands in the oven. It felt like everything clicked into place. No wonder I’d been such a wimp around ovens all my life. I had a very good reason for being scared of them. The fear wasn’t an unfounded one, just based on an evolutionary fear that heat equals bad.
My dad is extremely scared of spiders. Perhaps I should call it a “strong aversion” but that’s simply not what it is. He had to leave the room when my family watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We tried to nail down this arachnophobia once and got to the bottom of it. When my dad was in elementary school he’d been watching Gilligan’s Island by himself and there was a scene with a horrible, practical effects giant spider. Scarred for life, I guess. He laughed at this, “It was probably just a black pillow with coat hangers for legs, but it did the trick.”
My dad’s mom was very afraid of dogs and would often walk the far route in her neighborhood to avoid passing any, even if they were fenced in. Her mother was afraid of snowstorms, both of these tracing back to a distinct moment of fear in their youth. I once drew Baum a Christmas card covered in snowflakes and was chastened that it might scare her (RIP great-grandmama Baum, you would’ve loved global warming).
It isn’t novel to realize a moment of terror or great pain can result in a lifelong phobia. When I broke my leg as a 1 year old, I don’t recall any fear around ledges or stairs, but when I broke my other leg as a 21 year old, going down any flight of stairs became treacherous.
As a full-fledged adult who can use the oven all by herself now, I am not so afraid of it. I bake sourdough bread, roast sweet potatoes and chickpeas, even throw some banana bread in there if I’m feeling wild. I still wear oven mitts that go up past my elbow. I still turn my face away when I open the heavy metal door and heat comes flooding out and up. But I’m not afraid of the oven. I’m not afraid to get a little burn on my wrist as I’m baking something delicious. That’s just a battle wound in my fight for a slice of frozen pizza.
Carlisle Patete (‘22) came to Calvin University from the mountains of North Carolina and graduated with a double major in film & media and creative writing. After brief stints in Los Angeles and Chicago, she now resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she enjoys sweet tea on her front porch and identifying every tree and bird she runs into on any hiking trail.
