Inner Child?

Recently I have been reading the book Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. The book is phenomenal and I would suggest it to anyone, but there is one section that for some reason really resonated in me. I will write it here so I don’t defile it by my own paraphrasing.

"It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can 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. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. 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.

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. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears ,and getting a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, or safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness."

I have no idea why this fascinates me so. Perhaps it speaks to my childhood fears that I never could really express to my parents. Maybe it is being a parent and knowing that somehow I really have no idea why my child is crying and feeling helpless to relieve the fears.

Whatever it is it makes me wonder if part of what I am experiencing now is that fear for which there is no remedy. My adulthood dulled the fear, but given time to think, it rears itself again. This begs the question of whether the innocence and forgetfulness of adulthood is better or worse than the raw awareness a child knows before they are taught to ignore.

After reading this, I wonder if being in touch with my inner child is really that good. It is easy to forget how scary the world was back then, how much we depended on others, and how little we knew. I think what this passage does is make me want to rediscover those things for which I just forgot because they were too hard to address.

Life is no longer a 9 to 5 job for 40 years, retirement, and death for me. There seems a need for me to be reborn to my youth, before this warm adult stupidity crept in, and scary or not look at things from childhood with a new awareness and be open to their possibilities.