Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.

Kids chase the love that eludes them.

My father was more of a mystery. He lived most of the time in a farther-away realm more than he lived within the domestic universe of our home. When he was home from work, he moved through the house as if he were walking through water.

I adored my father and I feared him. When he'd lift me up to the sky with a laugh, I yearned to fly. I'd try, but I always disappointed him by crying out with fear of falling. He'd put me down and walk away. Later he'd pull me to his knee and circle me close to his heart. Despite the hurt that made him tight, I knew he loved me. And in the end, I was the one to help lead him through the door of earthly life to the other side.

It is an amazing thing,” my father once told me after Christophe was born, “how much a child loves a parent. That kind of love terrifies me.

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness - and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.

I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us — from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

Industrialization created the “Father’s Catch-22”: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

I have begun to see that even my father's harshness was a kind of love. An imperfect love, to be sure, but love nonetheless. He pushed me because he loved me, because he wanted no man to ever look down at his offspring. Now with time, rather than bitterness I feel blessing.… My initial fury has slowly given way to forgiveness.

How often had he longed to hold us, hug us, grant our every wish, but held himself back for fear of letting us see his vulnerability, believing as he did that real love demanded not affection but discipline?

He loved them deeply, but sometimes love becomes a power game between the ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves. (p66)

"Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.

("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")"

"The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word."

I wanted to be able to walk into the kind of places my father walked into. I wanted to understand what it was like to live like he did. I wanted reasons. I wanted answers…But I got nowhere.