The Sacred Myths Of Children

I worked in the system, with children and teens whose lives had been fractured by things they couldn’t control. Abuse, addiction, violence, mental illness, poverty, these weren’t abstract ideas in their world. They were the weather of daily life. Most of the kids had been apprehended from their families by social services. Taken, placed, and moved again. Group homes, foster care, shelters. Some had already lived in ten different places before their tenth birthday.

They came into care with their guard up, eyes sharp and wary. Some didn’t speak. Some wouldn’t stop. Their stories came out sideways, through drawings, tantrums, laughter that turned to rage. But over time, if you listened with enough stillness and patience, they would start to tell you things.

Not the facts. Not at first.

They told stories. Magical ones. I came to call it fairy tale ing , a kind of storytelling where the truth was replaced by something dreamlike, beautiful, and unbearably hopeful.

A girl once told me her mother was a bird who lived in the clouds, watching over her and sending feathers when she missed her. Another said her father was a secret agent on a mission, which is why he couldn’t come visit. A boy swore his real family was royalty, and that he’d been kidnapped by mistake. He was waiting for his carriage home.

None of it was “true.” But it was real.

Because these fairy tales weren’t lies, they were spells. They were soul-language. They were the child’s attempt to rewrite a reality too painful to carry. They were a search for meaning in the ruins.

When you live in the rubble of broken promises, your imagination becomes the only place where the world can be beautiful. These kids weren’t trying to deceive anyone. They were trying to survive. They were weaving hope out of thin air.

And I learned to listen, to really listen. Not to fact-check, not to correct, not to steer them toward “reality,” but to honor what the story was holding. Beneath every tale was a wish: I want to be loved. I want to believe they tried. I want to think I mattered. I want to know I wasn’t thrown away.

These were their sacred myths. The ones that let them get up in the morning. The ones that allowed them to feel like they still belonged to someone, somewhere.

I’ve come to believe we all do some version of fairy tale ing . We soften the edges of what’s been done to us. We tell ourselves the story we wish were true, until we’re strong enough to hold what actually happened. And sometimes, the story helps us get there.

Fairy tales don’t just belong to children. They belong to the broken-hearted, the abandoned, the hopeful. They belong to the ones who still believe in rescue, in return, in redemption. And maybe, just maybe, in the telling, something begins to shift.

The world doesn’t get rewritten. But the wound gets named. The child inside is seen.

And that, too, is a kind of magic.

~Shanti Freedom Das