Life Lessons that are hard

A while back, my dear firstborn son was looking and praying for a good friend.

I often encouraged him to search out friends, but with him being home-educated, his friends are mostly in another town and the "selection" of kids here is pretty limited since there aren't a ton of kids in this part of town.

So, like I was saying he was searching for a buddy that he could hang out with and there was this kid that would walk by our house everyday after school. He never had other friends hanging around him and so I figured that this was someone that my kids should pursue, and he did.

They hit it off the moment they met. They became fast friends. They camped in the backyard. Stayed up late laughing and cracking boy jokes. Skateboarded, snowboarded. They listened to music and sang along. This one kid became a huge part of our family.

He went to family functions with us, he would ride along to concerts with us, go skateboarding with my husband and my son, go out to eat with us; just the whole gamut of being part of this family.

We all really loved him, we really adored him, we had hoped that he would be in our family for years to come.

But it didn't work out that way.....

Last winter, he dropped out of Tae Kwon Do classes that he had been taking with our son. He stopped coming over as often. He would be friendly with our son, and then the next day not pay any attention to him.

He helped our son with his paper-route and half way through met up with some other kids and left, then the next week he did it again.

He started to change. It was so fast, it confused us all.

Then one day as he was walking past our house to go to school, my son asked him if he wanted to come over after school. This boy explained that he did something and so he couldn't come over because he was grounded...indefinitely.......

So, weeks went by and my son would go and talk to him as he walked by and he would ask him: "When will you be done being grounded?" The boy wouldn't ever give an answer, just saying that his mom had never told him when the grounding would stop.

Then, after about 5 weeks of that, the mother called stating that she would like our son to come over for this kids birthday party. I thought it was strange that the friend wasn't the one inviting him and I asked the mom if everything was okay between us and her family. She said that she didn't think that anything was wrong at all, just that the kid had been grounded for a week (!) and that the boy had had a little trouble hanging around the "wrong" kids at school.

A week. This kid had been telling us for FIVE weeks that he was grounded and straight out of his mom's mouth she said a week. Only a week.

So, we gently tried to break it to our son, that this kid was changing and that it was time for him to re-evaluate his friendship with him.

It was so hard on him. When we would say that the kid was trying to "break-away" from him, he just couldn't believe it. We told him that he was starting to hang around "wrong" kids at school and that it was causing him to have trouble. We allowed him to make the decision on whether he wanted to try and carry on a relationship with him.

So, spring came and there was still a thread of friendship left. This kid would come over randomly, not very often, but occassionally and they would play like nothing ever happened.

But then the swimming pool opened and my son would be there, and he would invite the boy to come, and he wouldn't go with him, but he would show up, and then ignore my son.

Ugh, the agony of having a friend like this. My son was so confused. So baffled at why this would be happening. We told him that it was ultimately his decision if he wanted to continue allowing this kid to be in his life.

So, after my son being ignored numerous times, the boy called two days in a row asking if he could come over. My son would put the receiver against his chest and look at me with questioning eyes as if to say, "What do I do Mom? What do I do with this?" I would lovingly pat him on his back and tell him quietly, "You need to make that decision." The very last time the boy called my son said, "It's just not going to work out." The boy never called again.

Over the summer, my son would have pangs of hurt from missing this very large piece of his life. There were many tears, a lot of healthy anger and so very, very much confusion.

Having a boy be such a huge piece of a family usually means that they leave stuff behind. A snowboard, a skateboard, a watergun. Those things sat in my son's room until yesterday. They had been a vital part of the relationship between my son and this boy. The lifeblood of boys. Those remnants of the relationship had been in my son's room long enough.

My husband, the leader that he is, told our son to write a letter to this boy. "Tell him that people grow, tell him that people change. Tell him that you have no hard feelings against him." They walked together, my husband and my son, with the items in their arms. Walked bravely up to the boys' front door and asked to speak to the boy. The mom and the boy watched as my husband spoke. He told them that he would often see the boy going to football practice and they he would always want to remember to bring back the boys stuff, and tonight seemed like the best night. They said their "See ya's" and they left.

My husband amazed me by doing this.

I don't know if this will make it harder for these two former friends to see each other, or easier, but it was the right thing to do.

As I went into my son's room to "tuck him in" he sobbed, just saying how he wished that he could still be friends with him. I held him close and let him know that everything works out for God's ways. That the Lord brought him this blessing of a friend and that we may never know why the blessing had to go away, but that we need to be thankful that we had such a blessed time with this one young man.

Oh how hard it all can be.

~B