These words carry a profound influence on my own experience.
For much of my life, I have looked backward at the boy I was: what he endured, what he needed, what was absent, and what should have been there. I have known the exhausting desire to return to the scene of the wound and somehow make it come out differently—to finally win what was lost.
But there is a hard and merciful truth in this message. The child within us deserves compassion, not abandonment. Yet the adult self cannot remain forever at the locked door of the past, waiting for childhood to reopen and give back what it withheld.
Healing may not mean getting the childhood we deserved. It may mean grieving it honestly, laying down the impossible assignment of fixing it, and choosing—one difficult day at a time—to inhabit the life still waiting for us.

“In order to become an adult, you got to learn to let go of that childhood you didn’t get.
Like, you can’t pick up adulthood if you’re still holding on to whatever it was you missed as a kid—falling through the cracks of what your parents missed as a kid.
And I focus on this thought because I feel like growing into healing is growing into loss, and losing that.
And it’s interesting because when I look back on my childhood, I have two memories: memories of what happened, and the memories of what should have happened. And that keeps me from focusing on what’s happening now.
Every decision I make, I’m still trying to merge those somehow and win whatever I lost when I was a kid.
And so now I live in this world that I don’t enjoy because I adopted this mindset of this incomplete little boy trying to travel back in time and fix whatever wasn’t right.
How much easier would it be to just accept that part that was missed, instead of putting my adult development on hold to wait around for it?
Because childhood is not a progress bar. It’s not task-oriented. It ends with age. Whatever it was is what it was supposed to be.
It’s not a new responsibility, something you got to go back and complete. It’s done.
In order to become an adult, you got to learn to let go of that childhood you didn’t get.”

The Childhood I Could Not Finish

I kept a room inside my chest,
Where every missing thing could hide,
A little boy who would not rest,
Still waiting to be seen inside.
He held his breath beneath the years,
And listened for a turning key,
He learned to make a home of tears,
And called that ache the real of me.
I thought if I could walk back there,
Past broken voices, fear, and night,
I’d find some hand within the air,
And make the whole world come out right.
I thought that love delayed so long,
Could still arrive and change the past,
That I could prove I did belong,
If I just held the wound more fast.
But childhood is not unfinished work,
No ladder waiting to be climbed,
No hidden test behind the hurt,
No clock that can be wound through time.
What happened left its mark in me,
A bruise beneath the grown-up skin,
But I can face it tenderly,
Without returning there again.
The boy I was deserved much more,
A softer bed, a safer place,
But I cannot stand at that old door,
And make my future bear his face.
I do not have to call it good,
Or say the loss was meant to be,
I only have to let it go,
Before it buries all of me.
There is a world beyond that pain,
A morning not yet stained with dread,
A life that does not need to chain
Its living heart to what is dead.
So, little boy, I hear your cry,
I will not leave you in the cold,
But we must let the old days die,
So I can live—and you grow old.
I’ll carry you with open hands,
Not drag you through the years behind,
And step at last on living land,
With mercy for my wounded mind.
The past may ache; the past may scar,
Its shadows may return at night,
But I am not that child’s old war—
I am the man who walks toward light.

…

DCG