Member-only story
The Child Within Awaits
My father and mother were divorced when I was about…seven, maybe? I don’t remember clearly. But I do remember the aching void he left. And my burning jealousy seeing other boys with their fathers: playing with them, disciplining them, BEING THERE for them.
When my mother finally began dating again, I had to have been a real problem for her. I was so damned needy. I remember one gentleman visiting her, and sitting on the couch. There was a love seat behind the couch, and I was curled on it like a little puppy, my heart SCREAMING to him: “please. Look at me. Talk to me. Hug me. Am I so hideous, so broken that no one wants to be my daddy?”
Oh God, it’s awful thinking about that. And FEELING what that little boy felt, his desperate knowledge that without support, without guidance, he could not survive in the world. She never remarried. I never had that energy, that connection, that protection and guidance. It took endless therapy and meditation as well as the guidance and modeling of two superbly human beings: Steve Muhammad and Larry Niven, to fill that void. It is one of the reasons I say I’d die and burn in hell before I’d abandon my children. I know what the lack of a father cost me.
I would be a monster to put my children through that, if I had any other options at all. And yes, I’ll die on this hill.
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