I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you. He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I ever had. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. My focus on Art was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. “Dear daughter, I won't try to call my feeling for Arty love. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.” We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skull for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all.

Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear'd worth of comfort. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.Ĭan we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, 'Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right.' The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. “It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality.

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