Digging a Hole

Husband’s parents owned a house with a large backyard. In fact it was about a half-acre that stretched straight back from the house.

During our courtship, he showed me around the space because when he was a child, it was sacred and special to him.

At the point between two rather tall trees that his mother had planted 25 years before, he stopped in solemnness before an obvious indentation.

“This is where I would dig my hole,” he said with a tone that often accompanies a hallowed moment or ritual.

“Dig a what?” I said in my spontaneous infidel reaction.

“I would dig in this spot beneath the shade of the trees. I got a shovel and dug and dug until it was large enough for me to sit in it.

It was cool and comfortable, and I could be out here all by myself.”

“No one bothered me out here.”

At that moment, I thought, “Well, yeah, the other kids were playing games or riding bikes. Who is going to want to come and sit in a hole with a sullen kid?”

Instead I asked him what it meant to him. Didn’t he get lonely?

It was because he felt lonely and rejected that he began digging his hole.

Earlier his mother told me how he spent a great deal of time alone in the backyard.

One of her favorite recollections took place when he was as young as four years old.

“He would play so intensely, he would lose track of time or even if he had to go to the bathroom. I would see him begin to run as hard as he could toward the house from far back at the end of the yard. Then about half-way here, he would stop and get a terrified look on his face. I would know what he had done – crapped his pants.”

Since I was madly in love with him, I said, “ OOhh! Didn’t you think that was cute?”

“Only the first time. After that it was stinky, and I got tired of cleaning his underwear.”

“What did you do?”

“I made him clean his own shorts. He gagged and gagged as he swished them clean. I think he vomited, too. After that, he made sure he came into the bathroom soon enough to do the job there.”

Mother-in-law told this to me with her characteristic smirk and laugh. I thought it was hilarious.

However, I did not bring up that story as we stood respectively before The Hole.

“Some days, I would spend eight hours at a time out here.”

“Wouldn’t you eat or go to the bathroom?”

He looked at me as if I had made the most inane comment ever.

“Well, I brought food out here with me. I could pee behind that tree.”

“What did your mom think about this?”

“She left me alone. It kept me out of her hair.”

I suspicioned she kept an eye on him from the kitchen window.

“How old were you when you sat in your hole?”

“I started when I was about six, and would dig it bigger each summer. I think I stopped sitting in it about the 8^th grade?”

“Eighth grade !?!”

I had a difficult time imaging a nearly adult-size body in the hole.

Today I know about the comorbidity of ADHD and depression, and I know just about how depressed Husband was as a child.

Depression and ADHD frequently coexist, but not in a peaceful way. Sometimes it is the first symptom that sends the person with ADHD to a psychiatrist.

I think The Hole was an allegory of Husband’s childhood depression.