“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
― The Five People You Meet in Heaven
The duality of neglect and parenting
I’m always told that children don’t care about what you’re doing for them. They don’t care about what you bought them or how much money you spend on them. Sure, they notice but it’s not something they are quick to remember unless, of course, they were taught to notice it. However, more often than not, they usually take notice of something else entirely. And, it was that one thing that became the basis for A Child’s Wish.
When writing this story, I looked at various styles of parenting so I better understand each of them can be harmful to a child’s mental development. Of course, not all of them can do real harm to a child but I wasn’t going to dive into too much. To simply my research, I zeroed in on one of the core reasons why a child could suffer trauma in their childhood: neglect.
Truthfully, I never knew neglect had that much negative power over a child. I admit that that mentality came from the fact that I’ve never felt neglected by my grandmother. If anything, she was a wee bit overbearing, at times; something she openly admitted to.
For A Child’s Wish, I wanted to show how a child yearns for attention and affection and the lengths they would go to get it. And, since it’s fantasy, I could have gone above and beyond with the lengths but I had to be mindful about the word count and not go overboard. Trust me, there were some short stories that I had to shrink about my ambition but more on that later.
After writing the story, I gave it to a friend of mine to read. When he got done with it, he asked me if I was placing Arabic/Muslim mythology on purpose. I told him “No” because I didn’t have any knowledge on the subject and it was the farthest thing from my mind at the time of writing it. It was then I was schooled on the origins of “The Djinn” along with some other details that I will definitely apply to the story when I decide to do a reimagining – or retelling. And, with that, I hope you enjoy the story.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
