J. Kevin Butcher's Blog

I’m at my mom and dad’s house in the town where I grew up – and this morning I couldn’t sleep so I decided to get up, go to a local coffee shop and work on a book proposal.  I got to the coffee shop and it didn’t open for another half hour so I went and got some gas for the trip home and then I still had twenty minutes left.  So I decided – and I don’t know why – to drive by the home I lived in for a few years as a little boy – from 1959-1963 to be exact.  I was 5 years old when we first moved to 1940 Windsor Drive and I gotta tell you that the house and neighborhood looked and felt a whole lot bigger back then.  It was [and is as I write] still dark and I drove up and parked outside the house for just a moment, trying hard not to attract attention as some kind of creepy early morning stalker.  And you know what I did, sitting there in the car?  I stared…and tried to remember.

And I do remember.  I remember losing my first dog that I named Bullet after Roy Roger’s dog.  He was some kind of German shepherd, collie mix and I really loved that dog and one night we came home and he was just gone.  And I remember one day coming in from the backyard where I had been playing with some neighborhood kids and I said a swear word in front of my mom and one of her friends, naively repeating what I had been hearing outside and I remember her telling me to go and take a bite out of a bar of soap and to come back and show her that I had really done it.  And I remember when I was 5 telling my dad I had to leave the dinner table to use the restroom and then I changed my mind and hid under another table in the front room – and he belted me until I had welts…for lying.  And I remember my little brother being born when I was 6 – but actually I don’t remember the pregnancy at all and don’t really even remember him coming home from the hospital and I don’t remember him being a baby which seems odd to me.  And I remember hating meatloaf sandwiches and one lunchtime throwing one in the garbage when my mother left the room and her coming back and figuring it out and being really, really, really angry.  And I remember feeling sort of out of it with the other kids in the neighborhood – like I didn’t quite fit and did the kids really want to play with me because I didn’t think so.  And I also remember some other stuff which I am really uncomfortable writing about – so I won’t.

To be fair – I have some good memories as well.  I remember watching Home Run Derby in my red striped little slugger pajamas on a Saturday night.  And I can remember waking up one Christmas morning and opening a junior baseball uniform with the old English D and running around the house screaming, “I got it, I got it, I got it!”  But what occurs to me, in fact what grips me and even almost overwhelms me is how few good memories I have about 1940 Windsor Drive.  How lost and lonely I felt as a 5 year old…and 6 year old…and even when I was 7 and 8.  And that when I drove up to the house just an hour ago…I started to cry.

My God, kids need to be loved.  And they need to be held.  And they need to be nurtured and encouraged and listened to and yes, disciplined but always, always in love and never out of the empty, angry places inside our wounded, parental hearts.  And we need to try to understand their world, what they are thinking, how they are feeling and we need to remind them that they matter, that they are valuable to us and no, they aren’t the center of the universe but they absolutely are the greatest gift God has ever given us.  And speaking of God, they need to know that He is their Father, their Abba and that He loves them unconditionally and will never, ever leave them.

And since many, many of us – all grown up – still sit outside our childhood homes, in our hearts, silently weeping…it is so absolutely important that we reach out to one another today and give one another the love that maybe we didn’t get much of when we were small.