“Mom,
I think you're going to find the love of your life one day.”
Son
#3 and I went for a walk yesterday after school. The walk is a new addition to our routine,
and he has always been known for blurting things out. These walks are designed to clear the cobwebs before homework time; they must also shake loose ideas he has floating around. More often than not, his exclamations have
granules or even cupfuls of truth.
Yesterday was no exception.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, you’ll definitely find the love of
your life…just not here in Georgia.”
Yes,
that is precisely what he said. And, I nearly
fell over. What proceeded from there was a
conversation about the time that we have in life and the things we choose to do
with it. “Being in love,” as this twelve
year-old understands it is what everyone is looking for. Of course, there are plenty of 50 year-olds
that think this, too. If you don’t
believe me, go have a look at match.com or okcupid.com or some other equally
heinous website. True enough that in
middle school there is a lot of effort being put into being liked. Wearing the right clothes and avoiding saying
the wrong things – these are key to success in the middle grades. Son’s thoughts on this no doubt swirl around
his anticipation of his first ever middle school dance.
We
do spend a lot of our time looking for love or wanting to fall in love or
wanting to fall back in love or some variant.
But, it’s really so unnecessary.
As I told son #3 yesterday, there are so many, many things to do and
thoughts to think and books to read…and…he added: “Doctor Who episodes to watch”
that looking for the “love of my life” is pretty low on my list right now. He looked a little worried. He assured me I could find someone. I couldn’t tell him it’s not on my list at
all because I think that the cats eating your corpse story if you die coupled
with the cat lady jokes that son #2 and I bat around when talking about my
future may have gotten to the youngest.
If
I could convince pre-teens, teenagers, and young adults (or all those folks on
match.com) of one thing it would be this: searching for love and/or having lots
of sex should not be your primary activity in life. You are worth more. Do not waste time, money, or tears on these
activities. Go and live your life. Find things that are interesting to you that
have nothing to do with finding a significant other. Read.
Write. Dance. Sculpt. Compose music.
Eat food. Have friends. Have lots of friends. Quit making Pinterest boards for a distant-future wedding. Quit hooking up. Do not spend time pining for the “love of your
life” or “the one that got away” or even “the one that sleeps next to me but I
don’t trust him or her enough to not go through his or her phone when he or she
is asleep.” Quit. Go and live.
Find things that fascinate you.
Live life.
This
is a hard pill to swallow and there are certainly hundreds of clichés and
self-help books that lurk around this pill but here it is anyway: Fall in love with yourself. By doing this, you free yourself and your
friends to love fully. So many young
people seem to believe that “needing” someone is equivalent to loving someone. They convince themselves that they need someone
to complete them, to insert in their Face Book relationship status bar, or to
spend Saturday nights with. If you fall
in love with yourself, you free those around you. This bit of dialogue from the 1985 movie Out of Africa illustrates:
Karen: But
I do need you. You don't need me.
Denys: If I die will you die?
You don't need me. You confuse need with want. You always have.
“Well, son, I’m pretty busy right now; I don’t
really have time for anyone else.”
“Okay, but, Mom…at least you have me and the
brothers.”
And that’s my icing.
Yo love the conversation with your son and with yourself! 2nd Act love yourself!
ReplyDeleteMany of the best conversations are random.
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