REWIND: When You Can't Protect Their Hearts

My daughter has been on my mind of late. Frankly, she is always on my mind as she has become an enigma herself the past 18 months. My mind wanders to the choices we make, the hands we are dealt in life, and how we "deal."

This is salvaged from the original Gray Matter blog. I wrote this in 2010 when EnigmaDaughter was a junior in high school....

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He stood her up last night. The boy who told her he wanted to take her to the Homecoming dance.

The boy whom she has pined after. The boy who sent all the wrong signals, red flags if you will. But she took him at his word. The boy who didn't call her for a week, then said he would be there, "unless something else came up." The boy who last night said he was waiting on his parents to get back to his house, even though I offered to pick him up. Who told her that once they got home he would need 10 minutes to eat (they were bringing him a Subway sandwich) and he would need another 10-15 minutes to "get ready."

All I could wonder was why he wasn't dressed and ready to head out the door once the parents hit the house.

I took her to her school, where they were to meet. She wanted to go in and wait. He hadn't called, he hadn't texted. I told her she deserved better, that he didn't deserve her. She asked me once what I thought. I warned her I feared she would be torturing herself if she waited. You see she only confided in me a few weeks ago that Labor Day weekend he said he was coming to the house on Saturday around 9 to see her for a few hours. He would be back from his first few weeks at college. He never showed. Worse, she had stood in the driveway for 2+ hours waiting on him.

Foreshadowing for last night?

She isn't crying anymore. She says she got it all out of her system in the girls' bathroom during the dance. That he made his feelings clear. Now she is quite stoic.

What is going on in her mind?????  I have been accused of being overprotective. I was in the earlier years, but have since done everything I can to let her find her way, to try new things, and make mistakes.... to learn.

But I can do nothing to protect her heart. And that is like a stake shoved through mine this morning.