Lately I’ve been responding to a question no one has asked. Or at least a question no one has asked for a long time. It’s one I encountered often, though, when I was out in the world supporting my books. The question . . . why did I choose to write for children?

I’ve already talked about the way many, if not most, children’s writers use story as a way of healing some primal wound. I’ve told, too, about the time I stepped away from my more “serious” work in college to write a brief paragraph describing the world through my little girl senses and how those few sentences came to life in me. And told about being my mother’s “baby,” being required to be that baby, and the wounding that came out of that enforced immaturity.

All fed my desire to write for the child I’d left behind, but any choice powerful enough to direct an entire adult life has more layers than can be laid out so simply. Today, I’m reaching for another layer.

This one begins with another very young memory, a time when I woke in the night feeling sick. I climbed out of my crib and made my way through the dark toward my parents’ bedroom. The house we lived in until I was seven was a tiny one, only four rooms, so it wasn’t a long journey. But it felt endless. When I arrived, I stood back from the tightly closed door, well back, and called for my mommy. I called with trepidation. Daddy was on the other side of that door, too.

My father was not a violent man. Even in an age when spanking was routine, he seldom disciplined—or at least seldom disciplined me—with anything but words. But his words cut to the bone. And he had made it absolutely clear that the woman he called Mommy, too, belonged to him. Far more than she belonged to me and my brother. Especially when they were in that bedroom. So I stood, fearful and alone in the dark, well back from that tightly closed door, and called.

What happened next, I don’t remember. Surely my mother came to me. She would have. But her coming has vanished from my memory. Only the little girl, alone in the dark, remains. And that’s who I’ve been writing stories for ever since. That lonely little girl.

My brother was almost exactly two years older than I, and he and I played and fought as siblings do. Mostly, though, he kept a careful distance from me. Years after we were grown, my mother told me that, when I was an infant, if Willis was anywhere near my crib when I cried—in that tiny house where he couldn’t be far from it—our father spanked him. Hearing that, I understood for the first time his lifelong distance.

And understood, too, that he must have been lonely as well.

I see the three of us—our father, Willis, and me—as separate, isolated spokes circling the hub of our taciturn but omnipresent mother.

I didn’t know then that I was lonely. How could I? The way we lived was just the way the world was made. And it took many years to identify the feeling at my core. But my memory of standing in the dark before that closed door stayed with me. My memory of being alone in the world.

I remember another night, too, the night two massive, dapple-gray horses came clip-clopping into my brother’s and my bedroom through the window at the foot of Will’s bed. They pulled a wagon, the same wagon they pulled when the old farmer drove those horses into town. (A horse-drawn wagon was unusual enough in the early 40’s that I watched them with great care each time they came into view on the road past the cement mill.) I didn’t ask how horses and farmer and wagon could fit through the window at the foot of my brother’s bed. I just watched, fascinated, as they moved along the wall next to his bed, then along the other wall behind Will’s blue desk and out onto the linoleum rug in the middle of the room. They pulled up next to my crib. And stopped.

The wagon was filled with children! “Come on, Marion!” the children called. So I climbed out of my crib and into the wagon, my heart soaring. Once I was settled among the children, the old farmer drove those horses straight into the black hole of the night wall on the other side of my bed. The wall that was perfectly solid, perfectly friendly in the day, but always disappeared in the dark. The wall I turned away from every night because the emptiness of it terrified me.

And riding behind those lumbering horses in a wagon filled with children, I wasn’t even scared!

How could I be? A playground waited inside that deep dark. A fine playground with swings and teeter-totters and a merry-go-round and a two-person glider that was Will’s and my favorite. We called it a choo-choo. The children and I tumbled out of the wagon and played and played and played. All night long.

Finally, when morning was about to come, the old farmer called us, and we clambered back into the wagon, and he drove those horses out of my wall and stopped again alongside my crib. “Goodbye, Marion!” the children called as I climbed into my crib.

It was a dream, of course. It couldn’t have been anything else. But it was so powerful that I’m not entirely sure I understood it to be a dream. And horses and farmer and wagon and children—especially those calling children—still live in my heart. They and that permeable wall are as real as anything I ever lived in those early years. Real and utterly compelling. So momentous that I never told anyone about it when I was young. Certainly not my family. Not my one playmate in the mill neighborhood, either.

I wanted so passionately to relive the wonder of it all that, night after night when Mommy tucked me into bed, I forced myself to face into that black hole. Faced into it and waited for them to come again.

Sometimes they did.

And that was the first story to begin to heal my heart.

Healing My Heart

A Purging of Pity and Fear

Telling the Truth