This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Apr. 15, 2016.
(Here’s another excerpt from my most recent essay collection, Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness :))
Hell No, I Won’t Go!
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he repeated, stomping his little, bare foot.
I ignored him. “I told you to get dressed.”
He stuck out his tongue.
“Now,” I said.
He was wearing what appeared to be a cheap Halloween costume, my little e ego, impersonating some kind of wizard or superhero in his puny, wanna-make-something-out-of-it way. He’d been storming around all morning in my head as I sat at my desk trying to write. Telling tall, mean, nonsensical tales about mutual friends and family members, whispering past secrets and grudges, doing his damnedest to get a rise out of me as I tried my best to get through one lousy morning in dreamland without blaming my lack of something I couldn’t quite name on an external source. When he failed to get a reaction he upped the ante, roaring around, arms flailing, conjuring imaginary disasters and predators, thunder and lightning, zombies and goblins, in graphic detail. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’ve had it with you, buster,” I told him, as he raced around and around in circles, screeching.
“I want the peace of God,” I whispered, pressing my palms together at the altar of my heart as earnestly as someone currently fantasizing about grabbing a small child by the scruff of his neck and wringing it possibly could. “I don’t want this anymore,” I told my imaginary Jesus. “Please help me find my way home.” But he must have been busy with some other A Course in Miracles student again because nothing happened. I still had nothing but murder on my mind.
“Enough.” I said, deciding to literally take matters into my own hands—never, I remembered in retrospect, the best idea—charging out of my chair and grabbing the ego by his bony wrist. “Get dressed and put on some shoes, mister—we’re going home!” I didn’t have to take this. After all, I was in charge. I was the decision maker who had chosen to believe this pathetic one’s preposterous story of defection from our one loving parent in the first place. I did not have to listen to this.
“Stop it, you’re hurting me!” he screamed at the top of his surprisingly cavernous lungs. “Help, police, help!” he yelled. “There’s a maniac trying to kill me!”
“Knock it off and get dressed you little vermin,” I hissed.
He squirmed away, threw himself on the ground kicking and screaming; dissolving at last in hysterical tears.
Jesus, I thought.
Overcome with guilt, I knelt beside him, my hand now and then inching toward a comforting pat on the back, only to get slapped away, with a snarl. At my wit’s end, I sat cross-legged, spine erect, assuming the yoga posture I found so comforting. I closed my eyes, drew deep breaths, and asked again for help from you know who to see things differently. To view this spoiled brat through the eyes of the teacher of love instead of fear.
After a while, sobs giving way to hiccups, the ego stood up, marched across the room, flung himself on the couch, and curled up on his side, thumb in mouth.
I continued to sit in lotus position, rhythmically inhaling and exhaling, in silent prayer. Eyes open, now, watching him.
He sat upright again, cheeks tear-smeared, nose running, sucking away on his thumb. “I won’t do it,” he said, extracting the thumb. “You can’t make me.” He plugged it back in his pie hole.
“Won’t do what?” I asked.
He glared. The thumb came back out, with a little smack. “Go home, you nincompoop!” he shouted, before plugging it back in.
I opened my mouth to respond, but no words came. I breathed some more, asking for help from our right mind, still watching him.
He sucked away, stroking his nose with his index finger, curled inside the edge of his cape; eyes darting around the room like a tiny, trapped rat. He yanked the thumb back out. “You’re a sneaky one.”
He had a bit of a lisp—thneaky one. I bit my tongue, waited for him to go on.
“You said you would never go there,” he continued, voice rising. “Never, never, never, ever!”
“I never said.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
I opened my mouth, and shut it again. After all, he was the one who said we could never go back. But I figured pointing that out right now wouldn’t do much good.
“Pinky sweared and everything,” he continued. Pinky thweared. The memory of the alleged betrayal seemed to energize him. He leapt off the couch, flung off his cape, wiggled out of his shirt. He was wearing flannel pajamas with dinosaurs on them. Way too big for him, like everything else in this imaginary world, practically falling down. Something about those PJs, the thumb, the lisp, the little whorl of a cowlick at his hairline, those chicken ribs poking out his scrawny chest. He was no wizard, no superhero, just a scared little boy. I asked him what might make him feel better.
He sucked away, thought on it a while. “A grill-cheese sandwich,” he said, finally. “Tomato soup.” Grill-cheese thamwich. Tomato thoup.
“You got it, buddy.” I said.
“The orange melty kind.” He climbed back up on the couch. “White bread cut up in triangles.”
I nodded. “I can do that.” I collected the ingredients, buttered slices of bread, and unwrapped squares of cheese. I opened a can of tomato soup, added the milk, and stood stirring it over the heat until the little pinkish clots dissolved. I set the food down on the coffee table in front of him, poured him a glass of milk. “Anything else I can get you?”
He extracted his thumb. “You could tell me a story.”
I smiled. In my peripheral vision, Jesus was smiling, too, go figure. I hadn’t noticed him come in. Talk about thneaky ones.
“Once upon a time there was a little boy,” I began. “He lived with his father who loved him more than anything in the whole wide world and the little boy loved him right back. They were always together—inseparable, really—playing and laughing all day and all night.”
“Finger painting,” he said.
“Yup. And coloring.”
“Building things.”
Just keep humoring him, I thought. “Sure. Playing with Legos. Eating grill-cheese.”
“And tomato soup.”
“Exactly. Then one day the little boy, who had a wonderful, wild imagination, wondered what it would be like to run away from home? It was a ridiculous idea, of course, because he loved his father and would never really want to leave him. But instead of laughing at the silly thought of it the little boy believed it! As soon as he did, his imagination ran away with him as imaginations do, creating a whole universe—planets and stars and mountains and oceans and people and you name it.”
“Horses and cows,” he said, slurping his soup. “Dogs and cats and giants and Cyclops.” Thyclopths.
“That’s right. Only now the little boy thought his father was really mad at him and so he could never come home. But it was all only a bad dream, really, just a figment of his vivid imagination.”
He had fallen asleep by the time I finished. The crusts of his sandwich abandoned on the plate, the white soup bowl empty save for a faint pinkish film. We were nestled on the couch together by then.
“And so his big sister came and told him he was just having a bad dream and she would take him home but he was too afraid and hungry so she made him some lunch first,” I concluded, yawning. This kid was contagious. I could barely keep my eyes open.
Jesus just shook his head and smiled, covering us with the fleece throw.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No worries. I’ll wait right here until you’re ready to go on,” I heard him say, right before I slipped away into another dream.
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.