The Devil They Told Me I Was

Sometimes the heaviest things a child carries are the things an adult placed on their shoulders.

I remember that night like I remember how to breathe.

It was my fifth birthday.

I had received some really cool presents, but there was one I couldn't stop thinking about a red and blue foam baseball bat. It came with a foam baseball and one of those generic little baseball mitts.

To a five-year-old boy, it might as well have been everything.

I wanted to play with it immediately.

But first, I was told to take a bath.

I don't remember much about who my grandfather was back then. I don't remember the sound of his voice or many conversations we might have had.

What I do remember is the hospital bed.

For much of my earliest memory, my grandfather was sick and spent a lot of time in a hospital bed that had been placed in the living room.

That night, though, I wasn't thinking about sickness.

I wasn't thinking about consequences.

I wasn't thinking about anything except that red and blue baseball bat.

I took my bath, climbed out, and ran back toward my new toys.

And I left the bathroom floor drenched with water.

I remember sitting there, fighting with the plastic packaging around the end of that bat, determined to get the ball out.

My grandmother kept telling me to go clean the bathroom floor.

My grandfather needed to go into the bathroom to take his medication.

She told me again.

And again.

But I was five years old.

My attention span didn't understand consequences.

My priorities didn't understand life and death.

I was just a little boy trying to get a foam baseball out of a package so I could play with my birthday present.

Before I could get back to the bathroom, my grandfather went in.

He slipped.

And he cracked his head against the toilet.

That night changed my life forever.

The Bathroom

The screams and chaos from that night haunted me for years.

I remember that bathroom.

It had always been white.

It was a place where my childhood toys sat around the bathtub. A place associated with bath time and innocence.

And then suddenly it wasn't white anymore.

There was red.

There was blood.

There was darkness.

There was panic.

A room that had belonged to my childhood became the scene of something my five-year-old mind had no ability to understand.

I remember the ambulance.

I remember being in my mother's arms.

I remember seeing the silhouettes of my grandmother and my father as the ambulance doors closed.

Then the lights began moving away.

The sirens grew quieter.

And eventually, they disappeared.

Then my grandmother turned toward my mother and me.

"Get him out of here. I can't bear to see his face any longer."

I don't remember much after that.

I don't remember whether we stayed.

I don't remember exactly when we left.

But I remember what followed.

For nearly two years, I didn't see my father.

I didn't see my grandmother.

I didn't see my aunt or uncle.

An entire side of my family disappeared from my life.

And I was too young to understand why.

Uncle Matt

Two years later, my mother was working at UMC Banner Hospital when she ran into my Uncle Matt — my father's brother.

I had so many memories of that man.

When I was little, there was this beat-up Volkswagen Beetle sitting in the front yard of my grandmother's house.

That car was rough.

No seats.

No windows.

Rust everywhere.

My uncle would come home from work with another part for it, slowly trying to bring this old car back to life.

And sometimes he would sit me on his lap inside it.

I don't know why those memories stayed with me for so long.

Maybe because children remember the people who make them feel like they belong.

Maybe because, at that point in my life, he was one of the first male figures I remember feeling genuinely cared for by.

Whatever the reason, I never forgot that Beetle.

And I never forgot him.

One night, I was home with my grandmother on my mom's side when she called me into the room.

Someone was on the phone for me.

I picked it up.

And after almost two years of silence, I heard:

"Hey, nephew. It's your Uncle Matt. How's it going?"

My body trembled with excitement.

My heart started racing.

I had so many questions.

I wanted to tell him about school.

I wanted to tell him everything he had missed.

But more than anything else, there was one question this little boy had apparently been carrying around for two years:

Did he ever finish that Beetle?

Before I could start rambling, though, he asked me something.

He asked if I wanted to see my grandmother again.

Of course I did.

I was thrilled.

After two years, I was going to see my family again.

But there was something I didn't yet understand.

My grandmother wasn't at home.

She was in a hospital bed.

Her body was shutting down.

Her heart could no longer carry on much longer.

She was dying.

The Hospital

The next day, I went to the hospital.

I remember walking into her room.

There were tubes.

Wires.

Machines.

The nurses had been called in to change her bedding because she had soiled herself.

Then my uncle looked at me.

"Let's go, buddy. I'll take you to get something to eat. Are you hungry?"

So we went downstairs to the cafeteria.

And he bought me so much Jell-O.

Boy, was I excited about that Jell-O.

It sounds like such a small detail now.

But childhood is made of small details.

Sometimes those are the pieces that survive when everything else becomes blurry.

We sat together and talked.

It felt like hours.

We tried to catch up on two years of life.

Eventually, my mother came downstairs to get us.

It was time to say goodbye.

We walked back toward my grandmother's room.

And this time, my father was there.

He was standing with a woman I didn't recognize.

Before I could get much closer, a conversation started between my father, my mother, and my tia.

Then it became an argument.

Their voices grew louder.

The energy changed.

I remember my tia moving me behind her.

She was protecting me.

My father became enraged.

And then he said the words that would follow me for years:

"Get that little devil out of here. He killed my parents."

I will never forget the look in that man's eyes.

But even more than his face, I remember those words.

Because words are different when you're seven.

Adults can hear something cruel and understand that it may have come from anger, grief, trauma, blame, or desperation.

A seven-year-old doesn't have that framework.

A seven-year-old hears:

You are the devil.

You killed them.

And sometimes a child doesn't just hear words.

Sometimes a child turns those words into an identity.

The Ride Home

I remember sitting in the back seat of my mother's car.

I was behind the passenger seat, looking up at this enormous hospital building as we drove away.

My tia was talking.

I think she was trying to comfort me.

But I couldn't really hear her.

Everything sounded distant.

Like a flashbang had gone off inside my head.

The world became an echo.

There was this ringing in my ears.

I was seven years old, frozen by something I didn't yet have the language to call trauma.

And of all the things I could have been thinking about, there was one thought running through my mind:

I never got to ask my uncle if he finished the Slug Bug.

For years, I wondered why that memory stayed with me.

Today, I think I understand.

Part of me was still just a little boy.

Adults were talking about death.

Blame.

Anger.

Families were breaking apart around me.

And somewhere inside all of that chaos was a seven-year-old who just wanted to know if his uncle ever finished fixing that old car.

That little boy wasn't evil.

He wasn't dangerous.

He wasn't a murderer.

He was a child.

The Devil They Told Me I Was

But I didn't understand that yet.

I grew older.

And as I grew, the weight grew with me.

My mind developed enough to begin making sense of memories that had once only existed as nightmares and fragments.

And eventually, questions started coming.

Was I the devil?

Was I created for evil?

Was I meant for destruction?

Was I capable of murder?

Did my grandfather die because of me?

Did I destroy my father's family?

Was there something inside me that hurt the people I loved?

Imagine being a child and trying to answer questions like those.

Shame.

Guilt.

Fear.

Disgust.

Confusion.

They flowed through me until I didn't always know where the accusation ended and where I began.

That is an enormous weight for anyone to carry.

For a five-year-old?

It's unbearable.

And yet children are incredibly good at carrying things that were never theirs.

They carry divorces.

Addiction.

Violence.

Abandonment.

The anger of adults.

The mistakes of parents.

The grief of entire families.

And because they don't understand where to put those things, sometimes they put them inside themselves.

Then they grow up believing the weight belongs there.

Thirty-One

I am 31 years old now.

I'm a father to an 11-year-old daughter.

And fatherhood has forced me to look at childhood differently.

Because when I look at a five-year-old now, I don't see someone capable of understanding the consequences of a wet bathroom floor.

I see a child.

When I look at a seven-year-old, I don't see someone who should be responsible for carrying the grief of grown adults.

I see a child.

And when I look backward at myself, I can finally see him the same way.

The devil they told me I was…

was a devil I never knew.

He existed in someone else's grief.

Someone else's anger.

Someone else's need to make sense of an unbearable loss.

But he did not exist inside that little boy.

That realization took me years.

So did forgiveness.

I eventually forgave my father.

Not because those words didn't matter.

They mattered tremendously.

Forgiveness doesn't require me to pretend they didn't hurt.

It doesn't rewrite what happened.

It doesn't erase that hospital room.

It doesn't erase the ambulance.

It doesn't erase the blood.

It doesn't erase the little boy sitting in the back seat wondering whether he was evil.

Forgiveness simply means I no longer allow that moment to decide who I become.

For a long time, I thought repentance meant somehow making peace with something I had done.

But how do you repent for something that was never yours to carry?

Eventually, I realized that what I needed wasn't punishment.

I needed release.

I needed to forgive.

I needed to forgive my father.

I needed to forgive the adults who didn't know what to do with their grief.

And maybe most importantly…

I needed to forgive the five-year-old boy who left water on a bathroom floor because he couldn't wait to play with his birthday present.

Because he had spent enough years believing he needed forgiveness for simply being a child.

What I Know Now

I can't go back and change that birthday.

I can't stop my grandfather from walking into that bathroom.

I can't change what my grandmother said.

I can't erase those two missing years.

I can't return to that hospital hallway and stop my father before those words leave his mouth.

But I can decide what those moments become now.

They can remain wounds.

Or they can become something I offer to someone else.

So I'm telling this story for the five-year-old who thinks something terrible was their fault.

For the six-year-old carrying an adult's anger.

For the seven-year-old who had something spoken over them and quietly spent the next twenty years wondering whether it was true.

For the little boys and girls who became adults before realizing:

You were never supposed to carry all of that.

Sometimes adults bleed on children because they don't know how to stop their own bleeding.

Sometimes grief looks for somewhere to place its blame.

And sometimes the person standing there is a child.

But another person's pain does not get to become your identity.

Another person's anger does not get to name you.

Another person's accusation does not get to determine what you were created to become.

Today, I know who I am.

I am not the devil they told me I was.

I am the man that little boy survived long enough to become.

A father.

A storyteller.

A man still learning.

Still healing.

Still forgiving.

Still becoming.

And maybe part of my purpose now is reaching backward through these pages, taking that five-year-old boy by the hand, and finally telling him what nobody knew how to tell him then:

You didn't kill anyone.

You were five.

You were excited about your birthday present.

You were a child.

And you deserved to remain one.

If telling this story gives even one person permission to put down a burden that was handed to them as a child, then perhaps something that caused me pain for so many years can finally serve a different purpose.

Because the words spoken over us can shape our identity.

But they don't have to define it.

At some point, we get to decide which voice we believe.

And today, the voice I choose isn't the one screaming from a hospital hallway.

It's the one speaking to that little boy now:

I know who you are.

And you were never the devil.

A question for you

What was spoken over you as a child that you've spent your adulthood trying to prove wasn't true?