Dibs: In Search of Self

by Virginia M. Axline

“So very, very much. There are so many wonderful things in here.”

“Books!” Dibs said. “Books and books and books.” He lightly ran his fingers over the books. “I love books,” he said. “And isn’t it funny that little black marks on paper can be so good? Pieces of paper and little tiny black marks and you’ve got a story.”

“Why you have left it just you and Dibs,” he exclaimed.

“There is nobody else in this box but you and me. Just the two of us.”

“As I said I wanted it,” he exclaimed.

“Goodbye dear room with all the nice books. Goodbye dear desk. Goodbye window with sky showing through. Goodbye cards. Goodbye dear lady of the wonderful playroom,” I read his message to him.

Three lines he had written: “As you said you

wanted it. As I said I wanted it. As we said we wanted it.”

After I read it, he took it and filed it away with our two cards.

He entered the playroom with a rush, flung his arms wide, whirled around, laughed. “Oh what fun! What fun! What fun!” he cried. “What a wonderful playroom this is!”

“Water. Water. Water. Come out and gush. Splash all over. Have fun!” Then he turned off the water, smiled at me, and walked over to the easel. “Hello, paints,” he said. “Are you all mixed up? Yep. I see you are.” He picked up the jar of yellow paint and turned to me. “You know what?” he asked. “What?” “I would like to deliberately pour it on the floor.”

“Yes,” Dibs said. “And what is more I will.”

Dibs unscrewed the lid. He tilted the jar and the paint slowly spilled out on the floor. “It makes a nice puddle of paint,” he said.

“I like pouring it out,” he said. “I like getting rid of it.”

When the jar was empty, he put it on the sink.

“I never did like that yellow paint and it makes me feel good to have poured it all out and gotten rid of it. Now I’ll get some rags and mop it up.”

“All this. And you. You’re not a mother. You’re not a teacher. You’re not a member of mother’s bridge club. What are you?”

“No, I can’t,” Dibs said. He shrugged his shoulders. “But it really doesn’t matter,” he said, slowly gazing straight into my eyes. “You are the lady of the wonderful playroom.” He suddenly knelt down and ran his fingers down my leg and looked closely at my mesh hose. “You’re the lady with hundreds of tiny holes in your stockings,” he said with a shout of laughter.

“Dear comforting baby bottle. When I need you, you bring me comfort.” He sucked on the nursing bottle for several minutes. “I was a baby again and I loved the nursing bottle. But six-year-old Dibs does not need you now. Goodbye, baby bottle, goodbye.”

“Goodbye, baby bottle, goodbye. I do not need you any more.” He hurled the bottle against the radiator and it broke into many pieces. The water in the bottle spilled out on the floor. Dibs went over

and looked down at it. “I have finished with it,” he said.

“Bury things. Bury things. Bury things. Then dig them up again, if you feel like it,” he laughed. “I tell you this sand is good stuff. It does many things. And you make glass out of sand. I read a book about it.”

“Little old play people. I’ll say goodbye to you now. And I’ll sit you down here in the living room and you wait until another little child comes here to play with you.” He turned and looked at me. “After I go some other child will come here and take my place, won’t he?” Dibs asked.

“You see other children in here besides me, don’t you?” he asked.

“It will make the children happy,” he said.

“Out of this window I saw the world,” he said. “I saw the trucks and the trees and the airplanes and the people and the church that chimes one, two, three, four, when it is time to go home.”

“Even if I didn’t want to go home, it was my home.”

He took my hands in his. He looked at me for a long time. “I want to go see that church,” he said. “Can we go over there and walk around that church and go inside and look at it?”

was a most unusual procedure to do so, but it was also a most unusual request. It seemed important on this last visit to grant this request.

We went up the front steps. I opened the huge doors and we went inside. Dibs

was dwarfed by the lofty archways. He walked slowly down the center aisle, ran a few steps, stopped, looked up and around him with an expression of complete awe and wonderment on his shining face. He was impressed by the magnificence of the chapel.

“I feel so very, very little,” he said. “I think I must have shrunk.” He turned slowly and gazed at the beauty around him. “Grandmother says a church is God’s house,” he said. “Now I have never seen God, but he must be awfully, awfully big to need such a big, big house. And Jake said a church is such a sacred place.”

Just at that moment, the organist started to play the pipe organ. Dibs ran to me and grabbed my hand.

“Let us go! Let us go! I am afraid!” he cried.

“Listen. Let’s don’t go yet,” he said. We stopped. “I am afraid of the bigness and I am afraid of the noise,” Dibs said. “But it is so beautiful it fills me with brightness and beauty.”

have never heard such music before. It makes me cold. It gives me goose pimples.” He held my hand tightly. “I have never seen anything so beautiful,” he whispered. The sun was shining through the colored glass and the beams of light stretched out toward us.

“Goodbye, God. Goodbye!”

“That was really very nice,” he said. “I was in God’s house today. For the very first and only time, I was in God’s house.”

“Grandmother told me once God was our Father in heaven. Father is another way of saying Papa. I wouldn’t want God to be like Papa. Because sometimes I don’t think Papa loves me. And if I believed in God like Grandmother does, I’d want God to love me. But Grandmother says that Papa does love me. But if he does why don’t I know it? Grandmother loves me and I love her and I know because I feel it deep inside of me.” He clasped his hands together against his heart, gazed into my eyes with a troubled frown wrinkling his forehead. “It’s hard to figure things like this out,” he concluded, after a long silence. He walked to the window and looked out at the church.

“Grandmother says God is love. And Jake said he believed in God. He said he prayed which means he talked to God. But I have never prayed. But I would like to talk to God. I would like to hear what He has to say. There’s a boy in my room at school who believes in God. He is a Catholic and he believes in God. There’s another boy who is a Jew and he goes to a synagogue and that is

the house the Jews built for God.” He turned and looked at me. He held his arms out toward me, hands outstretched. “But Papa and Mother are not God-believing people and so I am not. It makes me feel lonesome not knowing God.” He paced back and forth across the playroom.

“Grandmother is a good woman,” he said. “She goes to church and she sings songs about God. She believes.” He came over to me and took my hands in his, searching my face eagerly. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do some people believe in God and some not believe?”

But I’ll learn how to do it because all the boys at school play baseball and I want to play with them.

So I must know. So I try hard. And I will learn.

He skipped over and took his mother’s hand. “Hello there, Mother,” he said. “I’m not coming back anymore. This today was for goodbye.” They left together — a little boy who had had the opportunity to state himself through his play and who had emerged a happy, capable child, and a mother who had grown in understanding and appreciation for her very gifted child.

One day two and a half years later I was sitting in the living room of my apartment reading.

The windows were open and a voice — a very strong, lilting voice — a very familiar child’s voice came through the open window.

What have you got, Dibs?” Yes. It was Dibs and a friend.

“I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!” Dibs cried excitedly. “You give me that blue marble there with the snake eye and I’ll give you one of the first worms up this spring.”

“Right here they are!” Dibs dug down into his pocket and brought out a little glass jar, unscrewed the lid with the perforated top, and carefully extracted one worm. He laid it in Peter’s grimy hand. He was smiling. Peter was impressed. “Remember,” said Dibs carefully. “This is a real first worm up this spring.” Dibs had apparently moved into the big apartment house with the gardens down the street from me. A few days later I met him on the street. We looked at each other. Dibs smiled a big smile and reached out and touched my hand.