Heartbreak

As a parent, you think your job is to love (not really a job but a condition), nurture, encourage, protect, and to take care of your child(ren). Most of us take on the multitude of duties this role requires, the new fragility of your life and your child's making your earlier invincibility a distant echo. The world becomes fraught with potential danger for your young one, your spouse, and for you. No one told me becoming a parent would make me so afraid of so much in the world. But the other secret, the one no one ever divulged, is the heartbreak of a parent when your child faces the childish rejection that comes so frequently in the world of elementary school.

All of us have many heartbreaks, wounds healed or simply scabbed over with time. Most of us can recall the first time a peer, or friend, made you cry, your heart breaking as this person you thought liked you now decided you were no longer likable. It starts as early as memory itself, the heartbreaks of childhood.

Your personal aches are unbearable, becoming bearable only with time and distance. Each of those tear-filled afternoons, holed up in your room, wishing you lived somewhere far from whatever town, city, or neighborhood are easily recalled. They become the thread of your personal quilt of memories.

But to see your child's heartache, a certainty for any child, is something no one can prepare you for. It is doubly more painful than your own woeful rejections. Today was a day I realized how emotionally fragile I was to the many heartbreaks my child will surely face. It was no longer an abstraction, something I had steeled myself for, but was happening in front of my eyes. The look of pain and sadness I saw flit across my little boy's face was enough to make me want to snatch him from his classroom, keeping him home, protected from such things in the future. Each of these moments will aid in his ebullience and sense of wonder become just a bit more fragile, so that one day that sheer delight in being five will be replaced by all the reserve of having to protect yourself from others.

Walking home after witnessing, unbeknown to my son, his rejection from his 'best friend,' I thought how unprepared I was for all of the messiness of life. I projected to a future where his aches and disappointments will be wounds that linger, leaving traces of its existence beneath the skin and bones the world only sees. And how I have to love him enough to let him experience each of these moments, never standing in the way of them, no matter how difficult that is for me. These thoughts stayed with me all day, bringing on moments of panic. I waited to see him at the end of the school day, trying to see what damage that rejection would have. When he rushed into my arms, still exuberant, I knew that moment was simply that--a moment. And tomorrow would surely bring others.