The Hardest Lesson

Things that scare the bejebus out of me? Okay let’s see…there’s being buried alive, grasshoppers and clowns with chainsaws.

Oh, and reading on my son’s Myspace page that he got married three days ago. Married…to a girl he’s known two weeks.

That’s the stuff of nightmares right there.

Now CO and I have a good relationship with Orin. He just turned 21, and now that he doesn’t live under our roof, we don’t have to argue about things like piggy rooms, dirty dishes, unfinished chores, wasted food, time and money. We are past all of the teenage bullshit, and we actually enjoy each others’ company.

So I am thinking he would never do this. He wouldn’t get married and not tell us. He wouldn’t.

But then I started thinking some more.

Orin is a wonderful kid on many levels. But he is impulsive. And we do have the occasional issues with both maturity and responsibility…or the lack thereof. Also he tends to fall in love rather quickly, and become certain…absolutely, positively certain, that this time, he is really and truly in love. Really.

So I ask myself again…could Orin possibly do something this bone-headed?

You betcha!

I try not to panic. I think of calling CO. I think of calling Orin’s younger brother Marvin…he would know for sure. Instead I call Orin, and ask him if he needs to tell me something.

He laughs, “You read the Myspace!”

Uhm, you think?

He assures me this is a joke, meant to freak out their friends, and, I suspect, piss off his ex-girlfriend. I was an unintentional target.

Orin: “Do you really think I would do that without telling you?”

Me: “Well, knowing a lecture would be forthcoming if you told us, yeah, I think you might.”

He assured me if he was ever love struck enough to warrant a quickie wedding in Las Vegas, he would endure the lecture, and tell us first.

Orin: “It’s not as if you could stop me. So I’d let you say what you had to say about it first.”

He said this in a very unthreatening way, mind, but it is still there all the same. We can’t stop them! We cannot stop them!

It comes to a certain point in their lives, and we just can’t stop them from making these huge, monumental choices that given a tiny nudge in the wrong direction, can quickly become huge, monumental mistakes.

You have to let them live their lives…especially when it comes to love, or risk losing them forever. It doesn’t matter that you have loved them longer than this girl (or boy).

Then I remember being his age, and being in love, and probably putting my parents through the very same paces. I never threatened to get married to someone I had known two weeks, but I did threaten to walk away from my best (and only) post-graduate job opportunity for love. It would have been a monstrously stupid thing to do, but my parents couldn’t tell me anything. Surely they had never loved as I loved, or they would understand, right?

Turns out that they had loved as I loved, and that’s how they knew…love does not conquer all. For example, it does not conquer rent, or hunger, nor does it buy a new clutch for your old car. And love does not conquer the fights that inevitably come when troubles are high and funds are low. So I took that job, and I learned a lesson.

Heartbreak is painful. Committed relationships are not all love and sex. Love does not, in fact, conquer all. And sex most certainly doesn't.

But the thing is, I learned the lesson. My parents did not learn it for me.

And we have to let our kids learn it for themselves too, no matter how badly we want to protect them.

We can strap them in car seats, and put bicycle helmets on their heads. But they have not yet invented the safety device that can protect them from heartbreak. We cannot simply tell them how hard real life is, and expect them to understand.

They have to learn the hard way. And we have to watch…like our parents before us, and their parents before them. Which is the hardest lesson of all, I think.