Expectations.

My little brother was texting me in the middle of the night. Fine, because I'm at work in the middle of the night anyway. But he was upset. His girlfriend broke up with him because he spent the weekend with his best friend instead of texting her. He's 13.

My first thought was "Oh to be that young and innocent again. To have small problems like that rather than the more serious things that hurt me now."

But then I stopped. And I thought back to when I had my heart broken around his age.

I might have been young, but dammit, that heart break hurt! I felt pain, and it was real!

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are a few of those heart aches I never really got over. Sure, life moved on, things got better as pain was pushed aside, and eventually bigger, uglier things hurt me again. But that pain, that very real pain in that very real situation, still bothers me. It's like a wound that the skin grows over, but the inside never completely heals.

So what did I do?

I started crying. Like a big baby. Because I know how bad he feels right now, and there is nothing in the world I can do to make it feel better. Because I know that he will get another girlfriend and he will be happy again and then he will have another girlfriend after that, but that still doesn't make this pain any easier for him.

I hate when people have their own expectations for my pain and grief. So I can't have expectations for his.

But I can tell him I love him and that I will be home soon. And I think that helped. :-)



On a brighter note, a big thanks to Franchesca over at Small Bird Studios for making my blog pretty!