My heart is sore for my son.
He learned the other day from a gaggle of girls in the school halls that the lass he longs for likes another.
Tell me there is anything worse, and I’ll call you a liar.
I knew something was wrong a couple nights ago when from his darkened room I heard come a mournful love ballad by James Blunt. It played once, and then again, and again. No way was that good.
An 11-year-old boy listens to a song about unattainable love three times in a row, up in his room, with the lights off, for only two reasons: he fell asleep immediately after accidentally hitting the repeat button with a bony elbow or, he is one lovesick puppy.
And the first reason never happens.
I trod up the stairs, knocked at his door, and poked my head in. I asked how he was doing and he gave the ubiquitous answer of “fine.” I asked what was up and he gave the other ubiquitous answer of “nothing.”
It’s funny, isn’t it, how so often “fine” means “miserable” and “nothing” means “so-much-I can’t-even-quantify-it-so-please-don’t-ask-me-to-try-to-explain.”
But the boy couldn’t fool me. I could read the subtle signs that told a different story, like the way his face was plainly contorted with anguish.
I sat on the side of his bed.
“Did something happen with a girl?” I asked.
He gave a sigh of despair and told me what he had learned that day about the girl he has loved since first grade falling for some other guy.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
And with that I was 11 again and my heart became a lump of dull rock. It was not simply that I recalled my own first crush. It was that I literally re-felt the torment of that crush. Whatever the actual etymology of “crush,” I know now we use the word because when the feeling is not returned it is like having your heart crushed under the weight of forlornness.
A weight three decades old bore down on me.
How is it, I wondered, that no one wise ever warned me that wrapped up in raising kids are wrenching moments when you are thrust back into your own childhood?
I fell in love with a girl in the second grade. She held my heart for six years, but never handed me hers. It was torture. I once asked her to list all the boys in my class, cleverly thinking that I would be able to at least discern my ranking in her eyes. She named me last.
Oh, the suffering! Driven to despair, I promptly researched the French Foreign Legion, only to learn I was too young to enlist. I had no better luck with Tibetan monasteries.
Solace was nowhere to be found. I was condemned to wretchedness.
Adults who find crushes cute do so only because they have sealed off their childhood hearts and do not remember. But I do remember, and there is nothing cute about it.
“I know how you feel,” I told my son. “It’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
I told him about the girl I loved when I was his age and how I was cast into hopelessness and gloom when she did not return my ardor.
“Do you know what I found helped?” I said.
“What?” he asked into his pillow.
“Absolutely nothing,” I said. “If I knew I’d bottle it and we would be exorbitantly wealthy.”
He didn’t laugh.
“I do know this,” I said. “As miserable as a girl is making you feel right now, one day you won’t be able to stop thinking about a girl who won’t be able to stop thinking about you either and she will lift you a million times higher. That’s how love works.”
“That doesn’t help,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Nothing does. Just don’t try to run off and join the French Foreign Legion. They won’t take you. I already tried.”
I rose and left the room. As I closed the door, I heard the first strains of that love ballad start to play again.
Being a father is most difficult when there is nothing you can say or do to make things better.
Love works that way, too.
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