CHERUB

I was four, maybe five years old. It was December, and at the kindergarten we were preparing for Christmas. That day, we were supposed to create a little craft for our parents. The teachers had arranged the tables into islands so each of us would have enough space to shape the DAS clay, paint it, and then let everything dry without messing up the others’ work.

I was happy, I’ve always enjoyed working with DAS. This time, we had to create a flat medallion about 20 cm in diameter and carve the silhouette of an angel on it. I had prepared the medallion, but the moment came to carve the angel figure… and I froze. I didn’t know what they meant by “angel” or “cherub.”

Even now, I smile thinking about it, every time I tell this story around my parents, my mother steps in and says:
“But I had taught you the guardian angel prayer!”
As if to say, “I did my part, I gave you the necessary info.”
And I’ve always replied the same way:
“But I didn’t know what people meant when they talked about angels or cherubs. Prayer was something else to me, a formula you repeat to make something happen, not a message addressed to someone outside yourself.”

Back to the Christmas craft: while the other kids worked, I just sat there, listening to my body and my depth, trying to understand if that word carried any information for me or if I felt any presence tied to it.
But I felt nothing.

Something had to be done before this got noticed. Every day after class, my teachers complained to my grandparents that I wouldn’t eat—the food tasted awful. You hoped maybe it would be better but it never was. If the whole angel problem came up too, things would turn into a state-level issue.

So I decided to copy the other kids.
But oh dear, I still couldn’t see anything!
The kids next to me were completely bent over their tables, covering everything up.

Then I slipped quietly to one  of my friends at another table and whispered,
“What is a cherub?”
He answered, “Don’t worry, they are the ones protecting you!”
“Oh, okay, I get it!”
I returned to my seat, satisfied. It all made sense now.

One small detail remained: if the sky was supposed to be blue, I couldn’t paint my “angel” in its true colour. I didn’t have a clear memory of their blue skin, but I was certain that the Beings who protected me, who were connected to me, were blue. Since painting everything blue wouldn’t work, I chose green for the body, a colour not too far from their real hue.

When I reached the face, I heard a voice inside say:
“Don’t paint the face green. Do just like the other kids: pink face and blond hair, or the teachers will get uneasy… and then the problem becomes yours.”

I didn’t want any of that to happen.

To show that my angel was truly good, I gave it a big smile.
But my mind still raced, because to me, that look wasn’t right: pink faces are for children. My angels weren’t like that.
So, to bring back a little bit of truth, I added a handful of little stars, because that’s where they came from.

I was, and still am, proud of my medallion with the cherub.

Two reflections:

First, as a child I still had that intact urge to listen to my body and my inner field, to verify if the incoming information was actually true for me. In this case, “my cherubs” existed in the reality, they weren’t just symbols of my inner space, nor the result of some universally assumed symbol I had to conform to. I will write about them in future articles.

Second, it is about my inner voice, tiny reminders telling me to appear normal, not to make people uncomfortable. That vision is bittersweet because it meant I was already aware, at a young age, that some of my experiences disturbed others. And I was just a little girl.

Even if those were instructions meant to protect me, over time they layered inside me and became limitations.

The second is about my inner voice: those reminders telling me to be normal, not to get noticed, or to upset people That has a bitter perspective, because it could mean that I had already been confronted with someone who was upset by what I did or said, and I was a child.  The other possibility, considering that “my cherubs” are often referred to as aliens, is that those were instructions for my protection, to be remembered and applied in everyday life

Whatever the reason for those recommendations were, over time they became stratified within me, and became limitations that had to be worked on.