It is okay to be hungry.
[No. 41]
AS A CHILD OF DIVORCED PARENTS, HOW DO YOU FEEL AS YOUR 10-YEAR OLD SELF? WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM NOW?
“You do not have to be good”
Mary Oliver
My parents got divorced the same year that my beloved grandfather died and my mother battled breast cancer. I was four. As my world split across California and Oregon, I learned to be a peacemaker, to go with the flow.
For years, I flew under the radar, getting good grades, saying my pleases and hiding behind a never-ending collection of addictive Agatha Christie murder-mysteries, falling for the very grown-up, very fictional Hercule Poirot. Young Sam believed their value was greater following the rules and being uncontroversial. Yet, in the shadows of that small space, I experienced stomach ache after stomach ache and later migraine after migraine.
Instead of asking for what I wanted, I looked beyond myself for something [someone] to read my mind.
Then, one day, about a year ago, I broke up with Nico. I told him how I’d felt discarded and as I did, I felt a pain in my chest that felt as contemporary as it did ancient. The inner swell transformed into a steady flow of loud, guttural tears. Tears that belonged to my five, ten, and fifteen year old self. It was so liberating; a sense of peace washed over me as I wept. I was being tender to myself as it was happening, and I felt so [BEAUTIFUL]. I was holding myself in the ecstatic truth that the gold had been in me the entire time. It is never too late to be every age, to be both parent and child, fool and sage.
I had missed the point for so long.
I was witnessing my intact self for the first time. My relational history flashed before my eyes and made sense. Self-compassion flowed over and through me. For years, I had unpacked my experience as a child of divorced parents in therapy, and yet, somehow processing the dynamic alive in front of me crystalized where I had been holding onto and perpetuating the very ways I had felt unseen, unchosen [as a very young kid].
When Nico left, the phone rang. Through a torrent river of tears, I told my dad of the pain I had carried in my chest for 40 years. I told him that I craved one-on-one time, even still. We agreed to start with a phone call at least once a week at the same time, a promise we have kept. Telling the truth became a new pattern, and then a calling.
That day, my actions welcomed my inner child into the room. [WE ARE READY FOR YOU.] We do not have to be good to be claimed, and loved. Today, young Sam and I are whole and move as one, regardless of what is happening around us. We walk together, work together, rest together, sleep together, dream together. Hand in hand, we wake & greet the sun.