Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Mea was the sensitive and sensitizing person to whom I poured out my childhood woes, my adolescent insecurities. While my mother recoiled from intimacy, Mea invited it. She was my confidante, my "Big Sister," as she signed her weekly letter.

From Mea I learned about compassion for wounded things and the uncrushable human spirit. But I also picked up other messages, ones that still whisper in my inmost ear. Mea completely agreed that I was different from other people. Not only different, better. . . finer, more deeply feeling. My brother and sister, while Mea loved them, lacked my "perception." My father had a noble spirit, but dealing with crime had dulled it. As for Mother, she was a wholly conventional kind of person --attractive and charming, of course, but utterly incapable of understanding a personality as profound as mine.

These messages were delivered in a thousand ways over the years, not, I'm sure, with the conscious design of alienating me from my parents, but out of Mea's own deep need to be central in someone's life. By my teens I even understood something of her need and the role I'd been assigned in filling it. But I listened anyhow, like sailors in the Greek myth to the siren song luring them onto the fatal rocks. To the self-rejecting young person I was, Mea's words were music indeed.

I listened, and at some deep level I believed. The message could not have taken root unless the soil received it. Belief in a mysterious "superiority" always grows, I suspect, out of a deep insecurity

In the inevitable adolescent conflicts with my parents, Mea became the go-between. She alone understood me, she alone could interpret my rarefied thoughts to them. Mother and Daddy may not have grasped my exalted nature, but they perceived only too well the harm Mea's appropriation of me was doing. What bitter confrontations went on