Dear Spike:
My friend Jon moved out here about eight months ago. At the time, he and his wife expected they would be apart for just a month or two — he getting set up in Salt Lake City, she and the children selling the family home in Los Angeles.
But the housing market is difficult for sellers right now — and particularly so in L.A. So their family separation has stretched out months longer than expected and there appears to be no end in sight.
Life is funny in that way. It will test the limits of your patience and the bounds of your love. And most often it does so when you believe, as my friend Jon did, that you’re very close to “having it made.”
But the most challenging times in our lives are also the times in which we are given the most opportunities to grow. Jon, for instance, is learning to trust his wife to make decisions about their two children that they once made together. She’s learning to do things on her own.
Their children are learning something too, I think. In a world in which so many of their peers come from single-parent families, they are being given an early taste of what that is like. They’re still very young — three and five years old — and so it may be a taste they remember faintly, if at all. All the same, at this impressionable age, I imagine it may be enough to set in their subconscious minds an empathy that will help them understand and communicate with their single-parented peers.
Life is funny in that way, too. What is a hardship for you is a reality to many others.
I don’t know what your hardships will be. I hope that, for the most part, they are few, far between and easily surmountable.
But although it feels strange to me to wish for your life to be anything less than perfect and joyous, I also hope you are occasionally challenged to the heights of your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual limits.
In this nation, your family is called “middle class.” But it would be well for you to remember that, in this world, we are royalty. Indeed, we “have it made.“ As such, consider the times in which life tests your limits as an opportunity for insight and empathy.
Embrace these times as an opportunity to grow.
And know that, when you need me to help you through, I will be there.
Love,
dad
2 comments:
Well said. I had a similar thought the other day. Although of course we want our children to live a happy life, I think it is important that they experience some hardships, too. Among other things, I think it is important for my child to have his heart broken a time or two (because doesn't that make real love all the sweeter?), to live "poor" for a while (what better way to teach the value of a dollar?), to fall off his bike and scrape his knees (so he can learn that you still have to get back on the bike?).
After all, it's these hardships that make us real, well-rounded people.
Reading your blog, I found you when looking for Trisomy 18. I just got that scary phone call today, and have a 1 in 56 chance of this disorder. I was happy to see you have a great sonogram. Mine's in a week, and I'm so scared. Seeing a good result though, it will trickle in and maybe give me hope.
Personal Livejournal (as I use my husband's unused blog to post) www.livejournal/users/christianlady
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