My six year old recently opened a window for me so I could see into her make believe world. She said, “Dad, sometimes when I go to bed I pretend that everything in my world is alive, and that all my stuffed animals can talk, and that my monkey is the most powerful.” She continued, “When I am playing this game, I pretend that anything that falls behind my bed cannot breathe. The other night I told the king and the queen that something had fallen behind my bed, the king said, in a very mean way, ‘I don’t care.’”
I wasn’t sure that I liked the implication of an apathetic king – – is she projecting that from me – – Never the less, it was an amazing moment for me as a parent – – as though I had my very own “Alice in Wonderland” sharing with me her own personal experience from the rabbit hole. As though Mary Beth was Wendy and Peter Pan had sprinkled fairy dust in her room.
I am ever conscious that my time with my youngest slips through my hands like water through my fingers – – Still, I try and savor the time and this was a moment to treasure, so after she told me about her make believe, I read to Mary Beth a couple of poems including Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s, The Land of Counterpane. Counterpane being an old English term for quilt or bedspread, the poem is Louis’ recollection of playing make believe while he was in bed as a child. Stevenson’s poem concludes:
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
Stevenson, like my daughter, played make believe in bed, and his poem is a gift for parents who through it can encourage their children that even adults remember making the trip to Never Never Land.
My recent interaction with Stevenson made it all the more poignant when I read today a post by John Piper in which he describes how broken Robert Louis Stevenson’s relationship was with his father. Read the below excerpt – – keeping in mind that Louis, the author of Counterpane, was estranged from the father who provided the bed in which he dreamed of Counterpane and Treasure Island. And, be reminded how much it hurts for parents to have their relationships with children broken.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, was born in 1850 and raised in a Christian home in Scotland. His father was a civil engineer and brought up his only child to know and believe the Bible and the Shorter Catechism.
When Robert went to Edinburgh University, he left this childhood faith and never returned. He formed a club that had as one of its mottos, “Ignore everything that our parents taught us.” His father found this written on a piece of paper and was informed by Robert that he no longer believed in the Christian faith.
The father, in an overstatement that carries the weight of sorrow, not the precision of truth, said, “You have rendered my whole life a failure.”
Robert wrote to an unbelieving friend, “It was really pathetic to hear my father praying pointedly for me today at family worship, and to think the poor man’s supplications were addressed to nothing better able to hear and answer than the chandelier.”
The path would not be altered, nor the father’s sorrow. In the end, Robert pursued a married woman. She divorced her husband to marry him. Depression was not cured by alcohol. They sailed to the Samoan Islands in the South Seas, where Robert died suddenly at age 44 of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1894.
He wrote that “the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience sleeps well at last, [and life is a] pilgrimage from nothing to nowhere.”
A son is not a father’s only life-investment, but there is none like it, and when it fails, there is no sorrow like this sorrow.
* * *
Four years after the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, another literary giant, C. S. Lewis, was born. His story of unbelief has a happier ending, but his relationship with his father was especially painful for his father Albert.
His mother Florence had died of cancer when Lewis was 9. His father did not remarry. There were ample defects on both sides—father and son. But the wounding of the son was more conscious and almost brutal.
By the time Lewis was 20 in 1919, he was, to his father’s dismay, an avowed atheist. That Summer, in fact, he was probably in a sexual affair with a woman old enough to be his mother and living off his father’s money at Oxford University, and lying to him about it all.
Read the whole thing here.
See also this post.
I happen to be a Stevenson (in the US, but descended from the Scots stock), but unlike R.L., am extraordinarily blessed to have had a solid relationship with my dad (as he had with his own) that I hope to share with my own son, currently only 9 months old.
Heavenly Father, God of grace, shine through my feeble efforts!