As a parent you try really hard to be strong for your little one. But today was so damn hard that I wasn't successful at that. I had to go to school to do some requisite paperwork for graduation...and despite my very best planning...the former girlfriend was there.
Ahhhhhh and she was beautiful with her hair all fixed and her clothes all perfect and she did NOT look like she had just been crying at Publix (as I had been) just because a damn Indigo Girls song had been playing. It was devastating to be so close to her and be so unwanted. So I returned home and sat in front of my house trying to stop crying before I came back to my little man. But I couldn't.
I came inside and he wanted to know what had happened. So I told him I had seen our recently lost friend and that I missed her very much. I told him that I thought she probably didn't want to talk to me anymore...that she and I had hurt each others feelings really bad and she didn't want to be friends with me.
He was really quiet for a long time and then told me I should learn to be better at letting things go. He said that he pictures himself sitting at a really pretty table. And sometimes people throw things on his table that he doesn't want there. Some of the things are easy to knock off, like scraps of paper, but other things are big and heavy like rocks or rare earth magnets. You can't move those things off your table by yourself, that's when you ask for help. So my 11-year old son explains that you can ask God to help, or a good friend you trust, and sometimes it takes a long time to get your table clean again. He says the tricky part is not adding your own garbage to the table...because that makes cleaning it off way harder.
So he gives me a hug and laughs and says "I guess that's a metaphor!"
Holy shit my boy is brilliant.
Tonight I will that are cluttering up my table. And I honestly hope my former lover is doing as well as she seems...because there is absolutely no need for both of us to be hurting this badly.
Here's to the next 24 hours...may it pass more quickly than the last.
and it goes something like this
