HEAVEN, HEARTACHE AND THE POWER OF LOVE!!

“People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in sadness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”~John Cheever

Why is that?

Are John and Mary better off or happier than Tom, Dick and Harry? And what about Sally, who got hurt by Harry, right after they met? Will she recover and move on? Or will she stay stuck in the no-way-to-win-world-of regret, the “what could have been” point of no return? Will Sally learn to let go of the past and remember that God put eyes in the front of our heads for a reason? Please don’t look back!

I know the best marriage or divorce jokes are all based on truth, maybe exaggerated to some degree, but until you’re married for a while or get divorced, you don’t fully appreciate the genius mind behind the quips.

Now, replay the tape and forget marriage and divorce. Focus on the naive and fragile prelude that eventually leads to one or both…

Dating

Go back in time and try to recall your first love and how you got butterflies seeing your crush wait for you by your high school locker, proudly wearing his football varsity jacket, even though it was October on an Indian Summer day with a temperature reading 85 degrees.

Do you remember the first John who broke your heart? How old were you? How long did it take for you to recover?  What was it that helped you pull through? How did you move on?

Then think about dating and parenting.

What do you say to your heartbroken child, to convince her “This too shall pass.”?  How do you get your seventeen year old daughter to believe that she’s beautiful, lovable and more valuable than pure gold and  her ex is an idiot;  the offspring of Mississippi hillbilly cousins, who can’t recognize the value of a diamond when it’s sparkling brightly, right under his nose?  How do you, as her parent, get her to believe there is someone out there in her future, way better than the hillbilly football player idiot of a boyfriend?  You try to tell her that this will be the one who will make her heart go pitter-pat to a degree that will burst the mercury as it rises. But the more you try to convince her to believe, she pushes you away and you’re left sitting in a room alone, remembering yourself as that teenage girl, pushing your own mother away when she tried to help you.

Her one true love will find her

You can see how the love saga will end because you’ve learned from your own life experiences. You are well aware that your lovely little girl, now teen, will have to hop over  many frogs lined up ahead of her charming prince. One by one, she’ll learn to push the ugly creatures back into their cat tail- lily ponds. But in the mean time, in the now, witnessing the heartbreak of your daughter’s virgin heart, only seventeen, is killing you. How do you help her?…

You can’t.

You have to accept the fact that a teenager isn’t going to listen to you, her parent. She will only listen to her friends who don’t know much more than she. Her peers will be who she turns to for validity and comfort. They may (although well intentioned) give her the wrong advice, that will lead to more pain.

But you’re the parent and you can only watch from the sidelines and be ready to scoop her up when she fumbles. All you can do is play the role of “coach” and offer some game plays or suggestions, but you can’t MAKE your teenager do anything. The little girl of yesterday, in your memory, who listened to your every word, you could make. But that little girl has transformed into a new fragile beauty, a teenager in love, and you’re stuck now as the coach, not the mother who knew everything.

Stand by and wait.

Be there to cheer, listen, offer support or opinion (when she’s willing to take it) and pray she does better than you did as a teen, recovering from a broken heart. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll read the writing of an anonymous author whose words make sense and have meaning. Maybe by reading this short note, she’ll feel better and then so will you, her mom who has to play the coach.

There Is No Magic Bullet

Fast Tube by Casper

Getting over a lost love takes time and the time it takes to move on will vary from person to person. But when I was twenty four, heartbroken and struggling from a recent break up with my college sweet heart, a friend of mine mailed me a note written by an anonymous author and she told me to read it every day until I stopped wasting my life by pining over a memory. It was her way of reminding me to …

GET OVER IT!!

I still have the note, now yellow, crumpled and twenty four years old, but I paid for a Calligrapher to copy it over and then had it matted and framed. I wanted to preserve it for the future and for all the future amphibians I’d be sending back to their swamp. I’d have it available to read for times that I momentarily forgot to recognize the real truth about love.

The greatest love of all is self love.

Throughout life, there will be many goodbyes but the ending is only the beginning if we remember to use our eyes to look ahead and not focus on what we walked away from. Learn from every cute Kermit that plays with us in the pond, even if his visit is brief. And if the pond water looses warmth, get out quickly with no regrets. Leave the green croak-er in the mud. Consider the real possibility that your  future prince, right at this very minute, is leaving his muddy pond, beginning his search for you!

But more importantly, love yourself, keep busy and when you catch your self pining, stop! Call a friend, take a walk, do anything to distract yourself  from wasting energy on the ex. Dream about the one you haven’t met yet, but you will ( if  that is what you want for yourself).

If you are a mom trying to help your daughter move past the pain of a lost love, or maybe it’s your sister, friend or  even worse, ….you’re the one struggling to let go of a love gone wrong; read the words of this note and consider reading it every day until you believe it to be true.

Choose to believe

My own remedy to fighting pond flue was starting every day by reading a few words of caring. Hope it helps you move on to a much happier lily pad soon!

Best of luck!

Here is that old note from Betsy, my old college pal. It’s called:

A Few Words Of Caring

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