WOONSOCKET — He was 5 1/2 years old when his mother dropped him off at his aunt’s house in Providence.

She said she would be back to pick him up.

She never did.

So it began for Phil Winslow.

A few days after that, his aunt and uncle told him that he would be living with them now, that things were going to be very different, and that he was simply going to have to accept it, to be strong.

It would be several years before he saw his mother again, he was 8 or 9 at the time, and then it was only fleetingly. By that time he had become part of his aunt and uncle’s family, his two cousins becoming like brother and sister.

“My sister was into a very bad scene and I just felt Philip deserved a better life,” says Luann Navach. “And in the beginning, when I wasn’t sure if I wanted that responsibility, my husband, David, was the one who wanted him, because he had had a tough upbringing himself.”

And somewhere along the way, Winslow came to know that his mother was a drug addict, and that his father, who also had a drug problem and whom he didn’t really remember, was in jail. And somewhere along the way, he knew that whatever concept of what he knew as mother and father had been irrevocably changed.

That was the overview, anyway, the hits, runs and errors of a young life.

Beneath the surface was the journey.

“I was shy and introverted,” he says. “I bottled it all up inside. I always felt I was missing something.”

At times, he would sit and talk with his aunt and uncle, tell them that he felt sad all the time, as though deep inside him, someplace where no one could see, there was a big hole.

“I knew it was something that destroyed him,” says Luann Navach. “He was always asking the question, ‘How come she didn’t want me? How come she didn’t love me?’  ”

Eventually, Winslow came to know about his mother’s lifestyle. Eventually, he came to know that the father he never knew had done bad things, and he once overheard his aunt and uncle talking about things he knew nothing about, another reminder that there was a part of his life he really knew nothing about.

And until fairly recently only a handful of people knew Winslow’s story, his secret life beneath the surface.

“I wanted to be the same as everyone else,” he says.

But how can you be the same as everyone else when your father’s in jail, and your mother abandoned you when you were 5 1/2 years old?

Those were the questions he would ask himself as he lay in bed at night. Those were the questions that would run around in his head, right there with where is my mother and does she ever think of me? Does my father ever think of me? How different would things be if I was living with them? The questions that would haunt his young dreams over and over, the mantra of his childhood.

“So I basically isolated myself from people,” he says.

And he knew his aunt and uncle were sacrificing for him, and there were times he felt guilty about that, too.

Then two years ago he started to play lacrosse for Mount St. Charles. And from the beginning, he loved it. Loved being on a team. Loved being a part of something bigger himself. Better yet, he could lose himself in the game. Somehow, some way, playing lacrosse made him forget about everything else.

More important, it began to change him.

“He went from a shy kid with a chip on his shoulder into a leader,” says Josh Fenton, the Mount lacrosse coach.

Last summer Fenton talked him into going to a lacrosse camp at Brown, thinking that, even though he had only played two years, Winslow had both the speed and skills to one day play lacrosse in college.

That camp, coupled with his record as an outstanding student, led to him being recruited by Clark University, where he will be going next year on a scholarship. Without that scholarship, college would have been a financial struggle.

He has just turned 18, and life is very different for Phil Winslow. And it’s not just because he has become one of the top lacrosse players in the state and will go off to college in the fall. Nor is it the fact that he now sees his mother once a year or so, as awkward as that can be.

In his college application he wrote about being dropped off at his aunt’s house when he was 5 1/2, the day that changed everything. Wrote about how his mother had kissed him and said, “Goodbye, Phillip,” then passed him along to her sister, this woman he now calls his mother. Wrote about that scene that has haunted him, and the questions about that day that have never gone away, but “with growing maturity I accepted the fact that these questions may never be answered.”

He has come to know that his mother didn’t leave him that day 13 years ago because she didn’t love him. She left him because she had a problem and she wanted him to be safe.

He also has come to know that this has made him a better person, even if it wasn’t always the easiest of journeys.

He wrote about that in his college essay, too, how “today, the devastated 5-year-old is now a mature, employed, devoted young man.”

How working part-time at Fatima Hospital has taught him to be responsible to others.

How playing at Mount St. Charles has taught him to come to practice every day prepared and ready to play, for others depend on him.

And he wrote about the occasional lingering sadness, too. How “to this day I am still waiting for my mother to come by and pick me up from my sleepover. I often have dreams about that day. I freeze when I open the door thinking of my mother standing on the porch.”

breynold@projo.com