It’s You I Like

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This second time, I was on a pilgrimage of sorts in Florida, a week when my past and future collided in an emotional big bang. I had spent the previous two days with my dad’s sister and her husband, catching up after more than sixteen years. From there, I moved on to spend the next three days in my oldest son’s college town in central Florida.

My aunt and uncle and I had so many questions for each other. For the longest time, I wanted to know what my dad was thinking when he told my aunt he didn’t want my brother and me at his hospital bedside during his final days. I also wondered what my aunt, who was also a mom by then, was thinking when she agreed to his wishes.

But we never got to that.

Instead, over the course of two days — between walking on the beautiful beach at Longboat Key, sharing meals, and going on a rainy-day trip to an aquarium that included my brother (we had coordinated our visits to Florida so that we could both spend some time with this side of the family, though he was staying somewhere else with a friend) — we talked about our childhood and the events that transpired after our parents’ divorce, and our memories around them.

I was only five when my parents split, and just eleven when my dad moved to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming an actor, as well as have a midlife crisis that brought him to the depths of a self-made hell. That move was the catalyst that changed him from a Harvard-educated Navy veteran doctor to a destitute ex-con living in a shabby studio in a dull beige brick pre-war apartment tower.

My aunt and I filled in a lot of blanks for each other and corrected some of our memories. She was ten years younger than my father, barely twenty at the time of the divorce, and had only ever heard his version of events.

For instance, I thought that side of the family had cast us off after the divorce. My memory was that my grandmother had said, “Don’t ever ask anything from me again,” after my mother sent my brother and me to visit her for a week one summer. However, my aunt told me her mother would never say such a thing, and I imagined that perhaps my mother had alienated us from that side of the family due to her own shame at having an affair.

My aunt, in turn, wondered if my dad had paid child support. I told her I doubted it because we were on welfare and got food stamps (when they were actual paper stamps that made poverty visible), and if we had received the child support we should have, we wouldn’t have qualified for benefits.

I had a lot of time to ruminate on our conversations as I made the hour-plus drive to my son’s college town. Crossing the Cortez Bridge into mainland Florida, I felt myself moving not just across water, but across time, from past to present.

I felt sad for the little girl who was shamed, criticized, and physically punished by raging alcoholic parents, who thought that if only she were “good,” her parents would get back together.

I felt scared for the insecure girl who never lived in one place for more than a year or two, often sharing dilapidated rentals we couldn’t afford with boarders.

I felt ashamed for the little girl who was “white trash.”

I felt sorry for the young lady who made bad relationship decisions, not knowing what a healthy relationship even looked like.

After taking my son shopping at Target between classes and a fraternity meeting, I found myself watching Mr. Rogers. That night, I realized how much I had missed as a child. By age seven, after we left my comfortable, secure two-parent home for a big-city triplex, I had already become jaded and cynical because I “hated” Mr. Rogers. He was just an annoying interruption between the two shows I really wanted to watch: The Electric Company and Zoom. I used to flip him off. My four-year-old brother would scold me: “Don’t do that; he can see you!”

Messages about trust, feelings, constructive approaches to anger (or even that anger was okay), and his daily expression of care were lost to me. In the documentary, when I heard Mr. Rogers sang, “It’s you I like… the way you are right now, the way down deep inside you, every part of you… even when you’re feeling blue,” it occurred to me that there actually is such a thing as reparenting your inner child. I began giving myself the care, protection, and validation that weren’t there when I remembered childhood feelings of shame, insecurity, and humiliation. I forgave myself for making bad choices because I did the best I could with the information I had at the time.

My parents have been gone for a long time. I know they did the best they could with the tools they had. They, too, were once wounded children who became wounded adults.

I had given my children the childhood I wished I had. It never occurred to me that the little girl inside me still needed a parent, too. I dried my eyes and vowed that when I found myself slipping back into shame or self-criticism, I would tell my inner child what she needs to hear: “It’s you I like.”

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