A Purging of Pity and Fear

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

My parents were English to the bone.  While they didn’t agree about many basics, there was one value so imbedded in both that it seldom needed words. 

Feelings are not quite nice!

And so, a profoundly feeling child, I was perpetually out of step with my family.  But also as a profoundly compliant one, I kept struggling to live by those unspoken rules.  (And rules that never need be spoken are always the most powerful.)  At as early an age as I can remember, I found a repository for those forbidden feelings in stories.  Stories became a way of experiencing feelings without putting them out into the air where they would be condemned.

The first of those lives with me still.  I can’t name the title and I can’t name the author, but everything else about that story stays.  It was a picture book about a lamb who loses his mother.  The book was light blue with a fuzzy pink lamb on the cover.  On every page, my small fingers petted the pink fuzz.  Until . . . horror of horrors, the lamb became separated from his mother! 

With the lamb’s mother gone, lightning cracked and rain fell, a most Lear-like purging of pity and fear.  And what impacted me most, the entire spread depicting his terrible loss turned to shades of gray.  Shades of smooth gray.  Not only did all color vanish, but the comforting pink fuzz, as well!

By the end of the story, mother and baby were reunited.  Of course.  That’s what happens, what must happen in a story for the very young.  But I returned to that small book again and again, always pausing the longest on that colorless spread.  I petted the smooth gray lamb, grieved the loss, not just of the lamb’s mother but of his soft, pink fuzz.  And I experienced the relief of their reuniting each time, too, as though I were the one to have found my mommy again.

The book itself came from our small-town library.  And every time Mother and I went into town to the library, I returned my book and checked it out again.  Or perhaps I returned it and had to wait until the next visit to check it out again.  I don’t remember.  What I do remember vividly is the time we went to the library to discover that my lamb wasn’t waiting for me on the shelf.

Some other child had dared to take him home!

I was indignant.  Appalled.  Heartbroken.  I remember Mother and the librarian following after me, bending over me, trying to assuage me.  There were other books, they kept reminding me.  Other lovely books.  Books I could take home.  But I wanted none of them.  Those other books weren’t my lamb!

Finally, they convinced me.  Or perhaps they didn’t so much convince me as I realized I had no other choice.  And I picked out a book.  I can still feel that book in my hands.  It was small and square and fat with a blank, rebound cover in some bright color not nearly as comforting as my soft pink lamb. 

When Mother and I returned home that day—I remember this clearly, too—she paused in the kitchen to do whatever it is that mothers do in the kitchen, and I settled nearby on the living room couch, waiting for her to read my small, square, fat, bright book to me.

But whatever she was doing took more time than I could stand, and finally, in desperation, I opened the blank, unappealing cover and peeked inside.  And read the new book to myself.  To the end.

That’s the piece I still don’t understand.  Was I in first grade when this happened?  Had I already learned to read and simply didn’t recognize that my school reader—Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot and Puff and Tim—was a real book?  Surely, I didn’t learn to read spontaneously, like someone who is tossed into deep water and suddenly discovers the ability to swim.  But I don’t have an answer to that puzzle.  I know only that I didn’t know I could read, and then I did.  All happened just as I’m recording here.

I also know that the little girl who couldn’t get away from her mother and was never quite seen by her mother—not as the maturing child she was—needed to relive separation and reunion, again and again and again.  And thirty years later when that little-girl-turned-woman began to write her own stories, she told the same one . . . again and again and again.

A child leaves a parent or parent figure behind, goes off to experience the terrors of the world, and then returns, changed, to the comfort of the same or a new parent or parent figure. 

It is only very recently that I have learned, finally, to nurture that seeking child without the scrim of story.  And that discovery has been a source of great rejoicing!

It has also been a profound loss.

Because it was the seeking that created the energy that generated my stories.

I have a few more things to say on this topic—why I write for children—but while I’m gathering, I have an invitation to offer.  Would those of you out there reading who also write for children, published or not, like to respond to the same question?

Why are you drawn to writing for young readers?  What in you is being healed . . . or simply compelled?  I would love to post some of your responses along with a few comments of my own.