One of my greatest fears is coming to fruition.  My Son, sweet J, is just like me in all the ways I wish I wasn’t back when I was a kid. Now if that makes sense then I should just stop here.  But, since this is where I am going to write my fears for my child down in the hopes that he will overcome them, then here we go.

When I was a little girl, and well into my adult years, I was a very sensitive child.  I cried at the drop of a hat.  I felt for every friend, foe, animal, plant that was in pain.  I carried the burden of everybody else on my shoulders and it carried me.  I had friends, but friends hurt me.  I chose quite often to step aside rather than fight back.  I sat quietly in class and did my own thing rather than join in and not be wanted.  I was chosen last for every sporting team that was called out.

I overcame many of these things through time and a motto. “I may not have many friends, but the friends I have, I have for a reason.”.  This still holds true today.  I have a handful of close friends that I get together with or chat on the phone with but, I don’t have so many friends that I am constantly surrounded by, this is just my nature.

When I was in Kindergarten (there was only one when I was a kid, not two like J has today) I remember the hurt when my closest friends didn’t play with on a given day.  Or if one of them was sick and I felt like I had nobody to play with.  Or on the days when I did make a new friend, how the others would shun me and wonder why I left the group.  When truth was and still is, I love to be friends with everyone.  I never understood how we couldn’t all hang out together or one day play with one person and another day play with someone else, clicks started early and I learned how to deal with them early.  All the way through until High School, I had to deal with those same issues.

Now, J’s turn.  He is all those things and more, he is a boy.  A big boy.  His soft and loving heart gets broken at least once a week by a friend or another child at school.  The first round of sobs was about missing his best buddy who is not in his class this year.  Then there were the sobs about the bully in the class.

Then last night, the sobs were about one of his close friends ‘joining the bully’s team’.  Apparently there are two teams of boys in the class, made up by the boys.  There is T’s team (the bully) and J’s team (the rest of the kids who don’t want to be bullied).  I think his friend joined up that day to play with the cars because that was what T’s team was doing, but J will not play with T as he does not want to bullied any more. But, poor sweet J, sobbed and sobbed before bed.  Wondering why his friend didn’t want to play with him anymore.   We talked about it, even though all my mothering instincts made me want to fix it myself (not that I could, but I wanted to), and we prayed about it.  And this morning J was on a mission.  He was going to play with his friend, if only for the fifteen minutes of outside play for the day.

We arrived at school at the same time as his friend and the two of them walked together through the gate, over to the sand and started playing.  I stood behind the trees and watched from a distance.  It was like everything was right in the world of J again.  After school we talked about it some more and J was OK.  He said that they had a great time and that he wasn’t sad anymore.

I only hope that he can continue to get over these things quickly and doesn’t carry the same burdens I carried as a child, this is my wish.