“I told you so”.
The words were not so much on the tip of my tongue as they were in the pit of
my stomach.
I just needed to say it.
But she just needed to talk.
Her eyes were still red from the car ride home from the Myrtle Beach vacation
with her friend’s family. The sunny time on the beach had turned somewhat
stormy the last night when my daughter’s sixteen-year-old heart was
broken.
First the phone call from the boyfriend’s old girlfriend.
Then the call from the boy himself.
It seems my daughter’s absence had made the boyfriend’s heart grow fonder.
Unfortunately, though, it grew fonder for the old girlfriend.
“So, I can’t see you anymore,” he brashly informed my teenager whose shoulders,
and now, heart, were badly burnt.
“I told you so,” I wanted to say; but I didn’t.
The mom in me yearned to point out the boyfriend’s pathetic pattern her dad and
I had been complaining about for the last six months. I needed her to recognize
the wisdom of her parents who had repeatedly warned her that this young man
couldn’t be trusted even as far as he could throw a mean baseball. I
wanted to comment that this “player” did the same deed a few months earlier –a
deed for which my doting daughter forgave him as soon as the old girlfriend was
off to college again and baseball boyfriend found himself alone.
“I told you so,” would have given the bitter moment some sweet
satisfaction.
But instead, I
listened to her say she was over him, even though those beautiful brown eyes,
still tinted red, told me it would take a little more time. And I continued to
listen as she ended her beach break-up story with details of the ceremony she
and her friends had by the ocean –when she threw the boyfriend’s newly
purchased souvenir shot glass into the water, hoping to sink her high school
crush along with it.
Finally, her words stopped as she swallowed her last sob, sighed and leaned
toward me until her head rested on my chest. As I wrapped my arms around her,
the years melted away and she became less my teenaged girl, and more my baby
girl again.
I knew I could tell her I had told her so. What’s more, I
probably could have offered words of wit and wisdom on how she will one day
meet another boy who will actually appreciate her unbelievable spirit. I
certainly could have pointed out that she will, most likely, have her heart
broken more throughout the years, as well as break a few herself along the way.
But all the other words I wanted to say, didn’t matter after all.
All that truly
mattered was my daughter had a soft spot to fall, blanketed in the knowledge
she is loved more than she can comprehend.
And I’m confident she knows.
Because I told her so.
