For a long time, perhaps decades, the celebrations of “days” have bothered me, from Christmas celebrations to the days dedicated to fathers, mothers and children.

I spent my childhood in a city in northern Minas Gerais, today a large city, then a small town of the sertão, the Brazilian backlands.

Our family lived in the middle of the social system, and we mixed with very rich people (at school), very poor people (who worked in our house, were neighbors and were present in general occupations, including at the open-air market) and immigrants (Japanese).

Always, for reasons I understand better today, my ability to pick up on my surroundings and become anguished let me see absurd realities, in which people had little to celebrate besides being alive for one more day.

I was a child at a time when children were little listened to and often punished for speaking, a pattern that did not respect socioeconomic layers.

In every house, the “inconvenient burden” that children represented was clear. Nothing was done to observe them, not least because few adults gave the little ones any attention beyond operational, maintenance, often corrective attention.

The contrasts frightened me. A lot. Many times I could not understand the reasons and motives, and very early I went looking for explanations in books, many of them understood only later.

On days dedicated to specific celebrations, I watched the children: many had no parents or never received gifts. That made me suffer. A lot.

It took me a long time to see that I too was a kind of emotional orphan. My parents, though entrusted with the task of raising a multitude of children, could not get close enough to the children to know them.

That confusion generated so many expenses and so many worries that the feeling I have, even now, is of a prolonged vacuum filled with strategies to escape punishment.

That up-close look happened at my maternal grandparents’ house which, being far away, was almost a Kathmandu in my imagination, a paradise I lost for almost the whole year.

I arrive at maturity with an agreement with myself and with my inner child. I dismissed, with gratitude and honor, my parental figures who, for lacking the training to do so, cannot be penalized for not having done so.

I took on the mission of caring for my inner child, listening to her up close, taking an interest in her feelings and thoughts and guaranteeing her a love so unconditional that it would not abandon her. For nothing. For no one.

I learned this love from my children, to whom I can guarantee comprehensive, total love, with whom I was able to acquire relationship resources I did not have, with whom I was able to rehearse the steps that brought me here. Together, we lived through general and particular challenges. Along with small pieces of wisdom, a powerful and respectful love keeps company with our unconventional living together.

Speaking of patterns, I officially reject them.

Today there are families working beautifully without fathers or without mothers, with only fathers or only mothers. There are family communities, some survivors of unimaginable abuse, living together without attachment to the notarial formalities of socially approved patterns. What truly matters is love. It does not need a special day: it can be celebrated every day, with invisible rituals.

To anyone who wants to look at their inner child, I include here a proposed contract. As a transactional analyst, I am a practitioner of contracts. The sentences below can be used in a gentle reading to an attentive listener who lives inside the head: a child who will await this contact, I can guarantee.

A good preparatory experience is to make this contract with small children. Invite them to a reading for two, very close, almost embracing, welcoming the adaptations that will certainly arise and telling them that we do not know everything and that we can learn a great deal from them. And celebrations will no longer have set days.

Life contract I will make with my child

We are part of a story, you and I, I and you.

A story made of small steps, taken one day at a time.

Each day can be a new beginning. We can learn how to walk together, each understanding the other’s step, each in their own way and rhythm.

On our journey, my Parent ego state from the past sometimes wants to interfere, wants to take charge of the path, without giving you space or voice.

Know that it is often out of fear! We can talk about a way that is only ours, mine and yours, of going on together: leaving the rights and wrongs of the past in the past and defining our present, one that is appropriate, possible, lovable. Using my present self and all of your Free Child power, available so that we keep between us a field protected by love.

I propose.

Each step, a contract. When in doubt, a dialogue.
In sadness, comfort. In anger, respect. In fear, a lap. In joy, celebration!
We will keep walking together, different steps, different rhythms, different views, and how wonderful that they are different!
Our path will be expanded in wonder! United by unequivocal, unconditional, all-embracing love!
We will keep building our journey, day by day, step by step.
Your gaze renewing my possibilities,
my gaze validating yours!