I hear him weeping. I know he is curled up on the floor. I stand outside the room – he can’t see me through the door frame. My heart fills with his pain, remembers his longing for love and the emotion he didn’t know to call jealousy. I recall all the insecurities and fears swirling around. A stinging nostalgia grips me.

I look around and see a picture of mother and father on the wall. Look at that. I remember this picture.. so strange.. I’m older now than they were then. They seemed so old and wise – the very definition of reality.

That’s probably why I felt the way I did. I felt it and had no way yet to think about what I was feeling. But now I know – I took it all on myself. What I felt was, “there isn’t anything wrong with them, yet they don’t love me, so there must be something wrong with me…” Mixed with the pain of feeling so desperate and needy for love.

By adolescence my mind would grow and make enough connections to brew bitterness and anger. I would bear that for only a few years before “overcoming” and changing. That was so long ago, I can fast forward in my mind and see that all I had done was repress it, where it would slowly come out in other ways, like an invisible toxin. Opening that up, exposing it to the light, and working through it ended up taking years of concerted effort. The freedom was more than worth the effort.

But here, in this memory, I am weeping. It’s the only way I have to express what I feel. I stand here, a man, looking there at that nine year old boy, and search my own heart and life. I know things now I couldn’t possibly know then. I understand things I had no way to understand. I’ve experienced things over the years that have taught me in a way impossible for that boy to imagine.

For one thing, I understand things about mother and father. My mother was dealing with her own abandonment issues, and sought her identity in the love and acceptance of someone else. My father couldn’t be that someone because he was completely absent emotionally. His heart was walled off.

He grew up with a drunken father. His father would tell him regularly that he was worthless and would never amount to anything. My dad’s way of finding worth was to go into full time service to God, usually alongside a narcissist, controlling, cultish pastor. I suppose those pastors were my dad’s attempt to find a real father who would teach him how to live his life and how to be a man. Unfortunately these pastors were no men – they were child molesters and soul eaters.

My mother had children in an attempt to find her own belonging and worth, but it didn’t take long for her to realize we weren’t going to fill that need, so she instead found a codependent friend wherever we happened to live and focused all her love and attention on this friend. She was a chameleon, becoming whatever she needed to be in order to be accepted and loved by this friend. I remember her coaching us on what to say and not say whenever the friend was around, and I remember how she would change into a completely different person. This behavior resulted in affairs, with both sexes, and a few times of her running off and abandoning the family.

We were isolated as children. We were homeschooled. We weren’t allowed to watch TV, watch movies, step foot in a theater, listen to the radio, listen to “worldly” music, read “worldly” books, have outside friends, or have any friends of the opposite sex. Dating was forbidden.

My mother was supposed to be homeschooling us, but she would typically wait for my father to leave for work and then leave us home alone to be with her friend – coming back home before my father. We kids were left to fend for ourselves, even educate ourselves.

We were desperate for her attention and love, but her own pain turned her inward, made her into a narcissist. She would try to placate us with food, and if that failed she got upset. She would scream and a few times told us that we ruined her life and she wished we had never been born.

I remember that now. Feeling so desperate for love, for approval. Feeling so powerless to do anything about it. Being rejected because I was too loud, too big, too sensitive. Being told I needed to measure up to all the ideals we had been learning in our religion. That I was wicked and was probably not “saved” and was in danger of hell.

I was unwanted by both parents, the two people who should have loved me more than anyone else on earth. I was told I should never have been born… and so I was crying as quietly as I could, but failing to completely hide it this time.

I hold all this in my heart. Here I am, having worked through so much of it, but still facing some of the abandonment issues. That’s why I am here now, in this memory. This boy needs me.

I go over to him, put my arms around him, and hold him there. I give him the comfort that I know he longed for in that moment. I let him cry it out in my arms then say, “I know… I know… Such painful tears, such big emotions. You don’t even have words for them. You just want her to see you, to love you. You want someone to care, someone to make you special. Someone who holds you in their heart. You want your dad to teach you, play with you. You are filled with fear and anxiety over your life and future. You feel so alone. You are hurting and terrified.” He buries his head in my shoulder, and I hold his head there with my hand. I will be that someone now.

After a long while the crying stops and he looks up at me with his weary but still stinging heart. I say, “You don’t realize this yet, but deep down you are feeling like it’s your fault – that there is something defective in you that makes you unloveable and worthless. It’s the only way you know to explain why they have no interest in you, why they don’t love and nurture you. Every day they abandon you. Every day. And every day that feeling gets reinforced, made more real to you.

“I’ve gone on a long journey to a very far away place and have fought many dragons and demons. I’ve traveled through jagged mountains, weary valleys, and dangerous depths. I’ve fought battles and wars and sailed the high seas. I’ve seen beautiful vistas and horrible monsters. I come back to you a warrior and an explorer, a wanderer and a sage. This pain has made you lost… and the journey back home will turn you into a man. A mighty man. And after all that, I come back to tell you what I’ve learned.

“It’s not your fault. It is a lie that you are worthless and defective. You are beautiful. You are too much because you are such a big soul, such a big person. Your little nine year old body can’t contain you, and it makes all these hurting adults scared. Speaking of them, let me tell you why it’s not your fault…

“They were children once like you, and they were hurt like you – but they never went on their own journeys. They never woke up. They live in denial, never seeing or admitting what is going on inside of them, and so they keep coping, keep trying to numb their pain in the only way they’ve figured out works for them. Have compassion on them, though – it is one of the hardest things ever to open your eyes to your own wounds. You have to admit things about yourself that no on wants to admit. It’s hard. It takes a warrior. Your mother would have to admit how she felt defective and abandoned by her own mother, and your father would have to admit his own deep seated belief that his father was right about him, that he is worthless and nothing. Hold them in compassion, because in due time you’ll have the choice to wake up to the same things in you. It will be a battle you’ll have to fight. It will be bloody. It won’t be easy, and after it’s done you’ll feel compassion in your heart for your parents because you’ll finally know what they feel and how painful and powerful it is for them.

“And you, my little one. You are about to make the choice to bury yourself and become the ‘adult’ they want you to be. You will do this to try and win their love, acceptance, attention, and approval. You’ll eventually rediscover yourself, but it won’t be for a very long time. So I want you to know something… this real you is a marvelous creation. You are inherently lovable and worthy of love. A light in the world. You feel so strongly – you feel love, you feel emotions… yes, you also feel pain. When you are older these things will burn brightly and strongly. You’ll feel intense love for others, and will discover how much you love bringing other people to life. Being there for them, showing them ‘magic’, helping to awaken them. You will be a deep soul. You are not defective or worthless. You have a path in this life and in this world, and you are needed on that path. You have a purpose on that path, a belonging on that path. You will find your true family along the way.

“Don’t fear or worry about the mistakes you make. You’ll do the best you know to do. Your heart and intentions are good. The mistakes are necessary to make you into me. I am here now and will always be with you. I will always love you. I will never forsake you again. You’ll never be abandoned again. We will abandon abandonment together, you and me. Deal?”

He shakes his head yes. I give him a hug and a kiss, then wipe his eyes. We stand up together.