The Inner Critic

The Inner Critic

(“…one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Ephesians 4:6)

All you ever wanted was to be heard,
to be seen,
to be understood as
simply a boy who wanted to play
under the trees with half a dozen friends
who lived next door.

But you ran away sometimes,
you hid in the garage sometimes between
the musty moving boxes filled with photography
magazines.
You ate the candy you bought from the neighborhood store.
There, with a home-made crystal radio plugged into your ear
you heard
“Stop in the Name of Love” for
the very first time.

You knew you would be found,
you knew you couldn’t wait it out past
supper time. You wished you were
somewhere else where moods were quieter,
where
you knew how to build a playhouse out of
wood scraps from the back yard.
Or how to make a paper kite from yesterday’s
Herald Examiner.
Or were smart enough to know when to cry.

One day you started away toward downtown,
a half mile from home,
six blocks south where you bought your first
walkie-talkies that barely worked a block apart.
You dropped your bag filled with coins you had
saved since
Christmas and walked home to try them out
with your brother.
Nothing ever was as good as you hoped.

You made robots out of tin cans and pipe cleaners,
models of the San Gabriel mission out of shoe boxes,
and read encyclopedia articles randomly.

The voice you liked the least was the one
that critiqued everything you tried. It was
not your father’s nor your mother’s nor even
the voice of the principal at school. It was your
own
that scolded you, that told you how short you
fell below the norm. Even getting straight As
could not silence it.

The voice chased you, didn’t it, right past
the age when you married, had kids, and then beyond
the day when the last left home. And you tried
everything to make life sing the way you had
read about in those Faith Magazines.

Nearly 70 now, not 7, you rummaged through
storage boxes in the garage and drank a glass of
wine midafternoon. Some days the critic is
silenced while the divine soothes the DNA
that it damaged with its harangue demanding
perfection. The critic needed to

Feel loved too.