My Inner Child

My therapist asks me to reconnect with my inner child.
I cannot. There is none.
Surely you were little once. Think of yourself then, she says.
There were times when I was five, eleven, thirteen, sixteen
but I was not a child.
I was an adult who had not yet reached the age of majority.

When I was five, my frog died.
I am told I grieved so much
they asked the priest to talk to me,
about life and death, fleeting joy.
A teacher’s aide turned forty.
They decorated with tombstones;
prognostications of inevitable death.
When they found me under the table,
They were surprised
That I was angry,
That I vowed to hermit until I too was old.

When I was eleven, I learned
That I was fat.
Irredeemable. My crush didn’t like me back
So my mother (in her infinite wisdom)
“helped” me
(what I now recognize as sexual assault)
We bought him Halloween boxers
hung them in the cloak room
for all to see.
I wonder now whose humiliation was worse.

A classmate was harassed by a boy.
The school did nothing
until she left him vulgar, insulting notes to stay away-
then she got in trouble.

When I was thirteen, I had never realized before
that dichotomy between lonely and alone.
By yourself - at peace - was alone.
It comforted. Restored.
Surrounded by people and not one kindred soul
No confidante, no lunch buddy
my mother could not listen
her ears full of her own worries
made her deaf to mine.
That was lonely. Suffocating.
I can’t remember if it rained more that year
or if that is what I remember.

I lost my great-grandmother that year.
She treated me as a child - beloved but not
yet expected to shoulder the burdens of adults.
She taught me to crochet.
I have her hooks - a tiny touchstone with a loving person.

When I was (almost) sixteen, I learned
about kissing and desire.
Not from a boy - from a man six years older.
an ex-convict, tattooed, living in a trailer
parked on his father’s wife’s front lawn.
I learned too about adults and their whims.
The wife, once a friend, showed her true skin -
a creature bent on obtaining its own desires
without regard to anguish of any other.
That was the year I learned how to cut people out.

Later I had a boyfriend
brainwashed by his parents and the church.
I tried to raise him
but the damage had been done.
I could not raise us both.

When would I have been a child?
There was no time
between work, internships, angry bosses,
bitchy coworkers, marriage troubles,
history, science, English, geometry,
finances, traffic, French, statistics
feeding another’s desire to prove themselves
To whom? My question was never answered.

My inner child was sacrificed
on the altar of adults’ busy lives.