to my son
February 19, 2015 § 4 Comments
Yesterday you noted the neighborhood children piling off the school bus and registered familiar faces with remorse. You shared a simple wish for a reset button, a second chance to go back in time and not make old mistakes. You thought that maybe then those children you always considered friends would invite you over and include you in their easy comradery.
For a moment the car was completely quiet. I quickly contemplated all the ways I would use such a button, the choices I would remake and the actions I might retract.
My first response was to honor the humility and self-awareness of your wish. I validated your emotions and shared my own remorse for the impossibility of time travel. Then, I reminded you that friendship is not so easily misplaced. You were looking to the gentler memories.
I didn’t share my memories; the gatherings I tolerated adults mocking your inconvenient fascination with batteries or unfortunate unauthorized appropriation of household and garage materials for play. I didn’t share the destruction their children had similarly imparted on our home or defend your impulse to create when left outside the circle of their children’s company. I thought I could pretend away the things that divided us as parents, to save you a place at their table. I still remember the sadness in your voice when you would ask for help on the routine occasions those same companions made you cry and the quick dismissal of your peers’ accountability as we dismissed ourselves prematurely from each invitation.
I cannot guide your wishes any more than I can undo what has passed, but I can inform your understanding.
Friendship doesn’t point fingers or turn its back. It doesn’t come and go to the lull of convenience; it accepts us as whole, filling in the broken places with kindness not criticism. Sometimes we miss the illusion of something familiar, forgetting with the luxury of time the uncomfortable pieces of casual harm. You haven’t lost the safety of friendship, strangers lost the privilege of your forgiveness.
This doesn’t ease the ache in your chest; you miss what was never really there with the fullness of genuine loneliness. Rather than looking behind you, look forward; your truest friends are those who stand beside you.
Love, Mom
scribblechic 
Oh, this one makes my heart hurt. We all know those feelings, don’t we? Or maybe not. But we do in my family. Wishing the whole crew of you peace around it.
Thanks, Kay. To hear refrains of my own worries in my child’s unhappiness and the ineptness of my comfort; there is so little we can do sometimes except to make certain those we love know they matter.
Some day those and other memories will coalesce and become the stronger components of a complex cognitive framework. With your love, though the sharps and the burrs will be rounded off and the mans hand will only know that beauty comes with sacrifice and effort.
Thank you, Maurice, for such a lovely foretelling.