bowls of cherries revisisted

February 8, 2010

bowls of cherries revisisted

You know the movie, Groundhog Day where Bill Murray keeps having to live the same day over and over until he gets it right?

Or something like that.  It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it.

Anyway, for some reason, ever since 2/2/2010, I’ve been wondering about Groundhog Day last year.  I didn’t have any hard core memories of February 2009 until I looked back in the blog archives.  As it turns out, I posted on 2/2/2009 and it was the day after the Superbowl.  This is what I had to say:

I’ve been volunteering with high school students in one capacity or another for the last almost 6 years.  In all of that time with all of those  young lives intertwining with mine, there have only been two times where I’ve felt like I might be in over my head.

The first time was a little more than 5 years ago when a 15 year old girl lost her dad in a car accident.  She spent nights at my apartment, we went shopping for funeral clothes, we cried, we ate soup and we talked.  It was emotionally exhausting and I felt so ill-equipped to offer any kind of counseling.

The second time was last night while I laid on my bed crosswise, phone to my ear, listening.  Listening to a 17 year old girl, who was laying on the floor of her closet.  Listening to her cry with sobs that I could hear wracking her body.  Listening to her say that she misses her mom.

Her mom died when she was barely a teenager.  She wasn’t there to talk to when she was pregnant.  She wasn’t there when she had to make a decision that no 17 year old is really ready to make.  She wasn’t there when the baby was born, pink and screaming and beautiful.  And she wasn’t there last night when her daughter was crying in her closet, feeling alone and desperate and unloved.

A great thing about teenage girls is how fiercely they feel.  They feel love so strongly and they feel joy so strongly; but they also feel grief, desperation and loneliness just as strongly.    They are intensely emotional and without the developmental maturity to process all of their feelings fully, every emotion is linked and tied to the next in a crazy bowl full of spaghetti of life happenings – so hard to see where one ends and another begins.

This is where we are at with T.  She has already lived through so much more than any “normal” teenage girl her age – some things because of her circumstances, some because of her choices.  Either way, we are on the roller coaster with her because for better or worse, she’s stuck with us – forever linked through this little baby that has no clue about any of it.  Sometimes things are great and easy and everything is roses and sunshine and sometimes things are hard and every sadness, hard time and emotional pain comes bubbling up to the surface – hot lava revealing scars in it’s wake.

I suppose that if life is a bowl of cherries, some parts are sweet, some are juicy and some are just the pits.

With all emotions, things ebb and flow and with all adolescents (maybe not just adolescents), there is growth and change and regression, lather, rinse, repeat.  However, I’m happy to report that yesterday when I saw T, she was happy, peaceful and gave me a huge and said “love you” before she did some more mingling, then headed home for a few more hours before she drove back to her dorm room.

That day last year was the pits and there are surely more of those to be had, but yesterday was sweet.

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