I'm old enough to have some friends whose kids are headed off to college. They are in a bit of a free fall* these days (the parents, I mean, not the Gen Zers who are as ready as ever). Emotionally conflicted doesn't begin to describe it. It must seem like yesterday that their budding young adults were in the hellscape of middle-school drama, as my youngest, Tessa, was last week, when she called in tears from the nurse's office because her friend (note, how I resisted putting that in quotes) -- the cynosure of the 6th-grade-girl gaggle -- ditched her. She used the actual word: ditched, which I thought went out in 1978, along with puka shells and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.
I tried to say all the right things: (1) your friends are the people who make you feel good about yourself, no matter what, and even when you screw up, (2) this too shall pass, and (3) love yourself because you're worth it and then some. Admittedly, this parental advice was vetted by a friend who is a high school counselor. Left to my own devices, I would have gone ursine on the perp by calling her mother -- but that's a first-kid-parent move. It's a good thing I didn't go with the latter strategy because, predictably, Tessa called me from school the very next day, begging to hang out with the ditcher. And I, predictably, said "of course!" For ditching, we know some 40 years later having been both accused ditcher and distraught ditchee, is more perception than reality.
On the topic of friends in her Map of My Heart (above), Tessa wrote: "I love my friends because we make each other laugh and support each other." She made it last week in her "21/6" class, which is designed to help them master skills they will need in the 21st century. I am comforted by the fact that helping them know what's in their hearts is still on the list of modern-day, good-to-have skills for our kids. Good for adults too, yes?
I vow to reread her heart map often ... until the day we drop her and the Ikea essentials off at a college dorm room. Maybe she will allow me to hang it on her wall. (#wishfulthinking)
Till then ... what's in your heart?
* Love this definition: In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where its weight is the only force acting upon it.
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