Inner Child, Dinner Child

Sorry. That title is unintentionally sinister. Isn’t it?

Inner Child: It’s What’s for Dinner!!

That’s definitely worse.

This has nothing to do with cannibalism, even though I had a delightful conversation with someone who is routinely mistaken for a famous cannibal. My recommendation: if you spot someone who looks like a famous cannibal, do not demand a selfie and interrupt their obviously vegetarian repast with your bullshit. It’s just rude.

Dear reader, you are lucky (or perhaps unlucky!) that I am home sick today. For the past few weeks, I have had no writing time, in that I have given myself no writing windows because I’m too busy being in the here and now. Writing has priority over laundry, so the disarray is measurable; five baskets and two piles of measurable, to be exact.

Despite the disarray, I’m in good shape, moving in small circles, walking the small dog, shepherding the big emotions, making tiny jokes. I realized yesterday that I am a little lonely. It became obvious when I was explaining bananas to the cat.

What am I not writing about? Inner child stuff!! Talk about bananas!!

Like so many things that I once considered woo-woo baloney, this is a worthy concept. We all have early versions of ourselves that linger to varying degrees. Maybe the reason you fear buckets or sliding doors harks back to a childhood experience. Understanding it better will help you gain flexibility to cope with all kinds of future buckets.

I think it’s easy to go astray investigating the facts of events. There may be no record of the bucket incident, and anyone you ask may only confuse matters by telling you there was no bucket, but it was a trough incident or a well incident or there was something about a trashcan with a lion’s mouth. Your sister may not remember it that way at all, and so on.

What you can investigate, on your own time, is the emotions. This is tricky if you are like me. I stuff my emotions so quickly it’s like a supremely dysfunctional magic trick. Whoosh away that sadness, abracadabra that anxiety!! What anxiety? I don’t see anything!!

A lot of patience is required to coax forward an inner child, at least for the shy sort. I don’t even remember now how much meditation it took for me to unearth my main childhood feelings. Hours? I can’t even guess. We are stubborn, all of us in here, so that helped.

Following advice from a couple of sources, I have a framed picture of my seven year old self hanging where I see it every day. Days go by that I don’t notice it at all. My main task right now is to notice it and acknowledge her, the little weirdo.

As we grow up, I think most of us are in a hurry to push aside the earlier versions of ourself and get on with things. The idea that we could deny and ignore that child is so incredibly sad.

In my case, it is adding insult to injury. My little self has already been overlooked. She was so well behaved, nobody had to engage with her too much. So quiet and taking up so little space, give her a book, it doesn’t matter what it is. She had no idea how pissed off she was.

Being angry makes perfect sense and so far that’s all she needs to hear from me.

So it goes. I’m still not doing laundry today. My inner ten year old approves of this.

Love,
yermom

What? A book? Other books?