Inner Child Work
On our third date, Dan suggested we introduce our inner children into our sex lives. We were drinking whiskey on his uncomfortable sofa that was just two hard pieces coming together at a surprising angle. It felt like no actual human had sat on it during the design process. He was telling me that his inner child’s name was Danny and when he pictured him, over Zoom with his therapist, the image that came to mind was his father as a boy. A sepia toned image of a kid with a straight-across bowl cut on a steamship.
“A steamship? What year was your dad born that he was on a steamship?” I knew he was thirty-six but having a father on a steamship felt extremely old.
“Well, 1913. My dad had me in his seventies.”
That’s when I learned that having an old dad who died when he was in high school was one of Dan’s core wounds. Knowing that, I felt closer to him. I wove my fingers through his and felt a vein pulsing in his middle finger.
He stood abruptly and went to his bedroom. He came back with a painted wooden doll shaped like a bowling pin. It was him. The same brown hair and large blue eyes. His lips were a bit bigger on the doll.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Etsy. Look inside. See if you get it.”
I put the bottom half between my legs and twisted the top off with two hands. The doll inside looked sort of like a brunette Eminem. A bright yellow beanie and a Sean John tall tee.
“That’s my inner teen,” he said. “He’s my trickiest to work with.”
I opened the teen and inside was a doll painted in sepia tones with a straight-across bowl cut. It felt solid in my hand, weirdly thin and six inches long. The head was barely wider than the narrow body. It reminded me of the wooden dildo used in my high school health class to model proper condom use.
“Anyway,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was flushed from the whiskey or the wooden doll collection spread across my lap. “Have you ever tried tantric sex?”
I shook my head, fitting the steamship inner child doll into the Eminem inner teen doll.
“The orgasm happens in the subconscious, right? And so too can healing.” He sat up suddenly. “Maybe we could invite our inner children into the room and heal them somehow?”
We didn’t end up having sex that night. We just fell asleep on his stiff couch. The next morning, I walked twelve blocks to a train that would take me back to Bryn Mawr’s campus where I had just started my senior year. I should have known there was a risk of seeing a playground before I even reached it. The streets were filled with millennial parents holding coffees and tiny neon scooters. I heard a crescendo of collective shrieks and slipped on my noise canceling headphones, keeping my head down.
When Dan and I first introduced our inner children, it was only the third time we had sex. The first two times, I was very aware of the edges of my body and of his. Everything felt dimmed by the calculus of early courtship. His assertiveness and soft skin were a plus. Our age gap, neutral. His self-absorption, negative. What I wanted was to be in love. For all this initial calculus to be dissolved by commitment and mutual aspiration. A tapestry with all its colors blended. Maybe it was naive to think our inner child work would lead us there, but I hoped it would.
“I think we should start by getting centered and then start talking to each other about them and picturing them sitting in the room,” he said.
We sat cross-legged facing each other. He set a five-minute timer on a meditation app. At some point, he reached across and grabbed my hand. He had his shirt off and I could see the way his sharp exhales tightened his abdomen. I tried to match his rhythm, exhaling sharply through my nose. I wanted to take this seriously. I felt that if this didn’t lead us to some deeper connection it would somehow be my fault.
When the meditation app let out a low chime of church bells, he said, “First, let’s get naked.” I took off my top. He swallowed, then closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. I could see him getting hard in his pants so I reached for it.
“No, no,” he said. “Let’s go slow.”
Within five minutes, I was on top of him, my nipples pressed right below his bare collar bones.
“Tell me more about Mandy.”
I thought it was cheesy that he made his inner child’s name such a close variation of his own so I picked one that had no relation to my name, Jacqueline.
He looked at me expectantly.
The only thing I could think of to say was that it felt so good to have the shape of him inside of me.
“Come on, you got this. Invite her in.”
I thought briefly of making something up but that would be cheating the whole process. “I can’t think of anything.”
He lifted me off of him. “That’s okay, I’ll go first.”
He moved to the side of the bed, grabbing something I couldn’t see from the bedside table. “I feel like one of the wounds I’m working through, well I guess I’ll tell you more about it when we’re in scene, but it’s of being shamed at a young age.”
He opened his hand to reveal a small silver butt plug and a packet of lube. I nodded vigorously. Most of my friends at school were queer. I had always said I was bisexual but I hadn’t quite gotten around to the having sex with a woman part. Doing butt stuff with an older man seemed like the perfect opportunity to contribute to my friend group’s conversations. I interrupted myself—Be present. This isn’t about the retelling, it’s about falling in love.
“Okay, I was ten. It happened at school.”
I was impressed by how quickly he got onto his stomach, his bare butt slightly perched in the air. It made me immediately like him more. I spread the lube over the silver tip of the butt plug.
“So this girl was very annoying. She was the teacher’s pet, but also pretty so everybody liked her. You could think of her as an everybody’s pet.”
I pushed the rest of the butt plug in so only the red gem of the handle was visible between my fingers. I wondered briefly whether it had belonged to an ex.
“Don’t tell me about it. Invite Danny into the room,” I said, echoing his language.
“Good note. Okay, well, I noticed that she was the first one to grow boobs.”
I pressed one of my boobs against the bare skin of his ass.
“Well, I hit her in the boobs only once and maybe I squeezed one of them too. I was curious.”
I pulled the plug slightly out, then pushed it in again. He gave a slight groan.
“And, oh, the reaction. They said I was violent. Predatory. A threat to girls’ safety. They were gonna kick me out but my mom asked whether they’d let her deal with it because she was the art teacher at my school. They said that was fine so she put me through this long process of appreciation for women’s bosoms. Bosoms is what she called them.”
I pressed my tit harder against his backside. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, through sculpture and art.”
He described visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. How he’d be tasked with constructing busts of his favorite Greek breasts using papier mâché. He made one orange with black basketball stripes over each breast—he loved basketball—but when his mother saw it, she said, try again.
He pushed his voice into a higher octave to imitate his mother and said, “This is an object. We don’t objectify. So I tried again and made it flesh-toned and boring.”
I held the plug inside of him with one hand as I reached over to the nightstand and grabbed his Russian doll with the other. I pressed it between my knees and removed the top of each doll until I was holding only the inner child doll.
“But the worst part was before the museum lessons started, when the punishment happened.”
He was crying then, remembering. I took the butt plug out slowly and moved the wooden doll so its head rested right on his asshole.
“Keep Danny in the room. Ask him what he needs.”
I pushed the doll’s head in slowly. The skin around his asshole stretched, turning light pink. For the first time, I saw Mandy. She sat on the three-pronged stool in the corner of his room, swinging her legs and smiling. Carefully, she stood up on the stool and started dancing. She wore a light blue tank top with a built-in bra even though she was still a few years away from needing one. The room filled with this song by Ricky Martin that she loved. The pulsing trumpets. The words that rhyme: loca, boca, mocha. She was having so much fun. Her arms were straight in front of her zombie-like, moving up and down to the beat.
There was something else that came along with her presence. It was hard to put a name to. She seemed entirely free. Still relatively untouched by the elements of the world that sanded you into submission—approval and abuse. Best friends and bullies. This freedom was joyful, yes, but it also contained something else. Something disturbed or maybe even violent. I thought briefly of hurting him. Shoving the doll in so deep that it penetrated parts of his insides he’d never been aware of. I could almost feel myself do it. The doll was wedged tightly in my fist. Mandy didn’t seem to mind either way. She twirled off the stool, catching herself with one leg then pulling herself back up with the other. I didn’t do it. I just kept lightly thrusting the tip of the wooden doll in and out of him. It seemed to have a profound effect on him. His back shook slightly.
“You got this baby,” I heard myself say.
“I don’t want to come yet.” He collapsed on his stomach. I pulled the doll’s head out slowly. I grabbed lotion from the bedside table and moved him lightly onto his back. With lotion-soaked fingers, I made a circle shape around each of his pectorals, miming the basketball breasts that he loved so much.
“Thank you,” he said, smiling hazily up at me. “Are you ready?”
I was. I got on top of him.
“Okay, well I was in second grade, I think seven and—”
I lifted my hips up and my voice went up too. “This boy Ryder used to choose a kid to drag around the playground by their ankles and that fall he kept choosing me.”
I pushed my hips back down into him.
“I remember the ground was like rubberized so my shoulders or any skin that was bare would be ground clean by those little plastic particles.”
He pressed his fingernails into the backs of my shoulders almost like he was mimicking the plastic particles. It felt good.
“My bare calf would hit the side of the metal water fountain and a welt would grow.”
He laid me onto my back and pressed his hand on the loose part under my belly button where soft fat floated. He put two fingers inside me and moved them in a rounded come here motion. Come here come here come here, he may have even said it out loud.
“Invite Mandy into the room.”
She had been there the whole time standing at his dresser. But in the light of my attention, she started pulling things out of it. I could see her there even though I was staring at the ceiling. She was flat-chested and layering clothing so that being dragged around the playground wouldn’t hurt so much.
“That’s good, baby,” Dan said, and I noticed I was crying.
It wasn’t picturing my young self being dragged around the playground that made me cry, it was watching her try so hard to protect herself. It was thinking of her overheating while wearing two layers in the classroom with the broken radiator.
Mandy turned from the dresser and began watching us on the bed together, blankly, as though seeing right through us. I felt something turn. A suddenly strong desire for me and Mandy to be the ones doing harm. I pushed Dan off of me so he was flat on his back. He wasn’t even really hard but I fit him inside of me and moved up and down. I placed my hands on either side of his throat. I thought, briefly, of something I learned in middle school that I’d never forgotten. You could press hard at the hollow triangle where a person’s collar bones met and kill them. I had never checked to see if that was true. But whenever I got close enough to that part of someone, I felt my fingertips shimmer slightly at the possibility.
Many things merged within me. A brightly lit beach day with red buckets floating in hand-dug tidepools. Then, a tidal wave. A childhood tantrum where everything goes bright red then black. He lifted his hips slightly, pressing them up against me. Our rhythm became more fluid as I rode this rage. Mandy was dancing again to some kind of Cha Cha Slide with all the steps improvised. She flitted between rage and glee so quickly it was almost as though they were made of the same substantive material. I felt a final surge then moved myself off of him. Mandy was distracted. She was extending a long sleeve shirt of Dan’s between her hands and attempting to jump rope with it. I cried big sobs that moved through my chest sideways. “Good job,” he murmured, unharmed. Once the sobs dimmed to a whimper, he rubbed lotion on my shoulders and calves like he was actually trying to heal the little welts that the rubberized playground had left.
On the walk to the train after, I had no urge to check my phone or text. I noticed things passively like they were momentarily a part of my body before passing right through it. The trees that were just turning. Their leaves green with bright red edges, like they’d been dipped in a fondue pot of imminent death. I passed a playground and didn’t cross the street or move to protect myself. I just heard the sounds of the shrieking children bounce into my brain and pass right through. This must be healing, I thought. It must be.
I’d like to say that we fell in love but we never really connected again after that. He was traveling the next two weekends for friends’ weddings (a novelty I was years from experiencing). The week after that, I got a series of texts from him at 10pm. I was sitting at the desk in my dorm room, vaguely reading. He said I’d helped transform something in him. He hoped he’d done the same for me. He wanted to find someone more age appropriate, to really start his life. I deserved a youthful love, one that’s right for the stage I’m in.
I didn’t respond to the texts right away. I went to the small dance studio in the basement of the campus center. It was unlocked but empty. There were long mirrors and a ballet bar on the far wall. I connected my phone to the industrial sound system and turned off the lights. A Ricky Martin album played so loudly my ears itched. How could I invite Mandy in? I put my hands on my head and pumped my elbows. I heard a small voice. Keep going. I zombie walked across the room then fell to my knees with an air guitar. I flipped onto my back and waved my arms and legs in the air. I stood up with my eyes closed and kept dancing in this flailing, private way.
At first, I didn’t notice her. I assumed she’d come in the same hallucinatory way she had before. But without Daniel, or Danny, around, she moved quietly. I felt her as a bright purple presence through my chest and arms. At one point, I held out my hands and felt her take them. I spun her around. I could feel her feet lift off the ground as I held her entire weight. She could be everything she wanted. Over the music, I couldn’t tell if it was her giggling or me. We danced until a crack of light appeared on the ceiling. A janitor circled his finger in the air and smiled widely. Wrap it up, the building was closed for the night.
Later, at twenty-nine, I would be in love and realize it was my first time. A woman named Sarah. It wasn’t the forced blurring I thought it would be. Above each of our bedside tables, we tacked a photo of ourselves as children. In hers, she balanced on the back of a small motorboat, trying to wrench a tree branch out of its engine. Mine was taken a year before Ryder’s bullying began. A blue tank top and a smug squinty-eyed look. Reminders that within each of us exists something both precious and perturbed. Disturbing and defenseless.
Zoe Flavin (@zoebflavin) is an MFA candidate in fiction at New York University. Prior to attending NYU, she ran Planned Parenthood’s sex education programs for the state of Utah. She’s currently at work on her first novel about an unlikely support group. You can learn more about her work at zoebflavin.substack.com.