We've Survived

What, exactly, have we survived, you may be asking.

The first high school breakup.

Jock had found himself a cute little girlfriend within the first month of school. Not surprising, as my son is quite the handsome guy. (If I wasn't so paranoid about Internet stalkers, I'd post a picture of him for you to see.) For my purposes, I'm going to call this girl Tinkerbell.

Now, Coach and I have not been overly thrilled with this whole thing with Tinkerbell from the start. See, she's not allowed to even have a boyfriend. Which means she is sneaking around school and on the phone, hiding my son from her father. But if there's one thing I've discovered in life its that if you tell your child that they can't have something that everyone else is having... they WILL find a way to have it. I suspect Tinkerbell's papa knows this, and hope he can't possibly be as clueless as he would need to be to think his daughter is actually obeying this dictate. However, she's not my problem....errr, child. Jock is.

Throughout the last couple of months, this relationship has followed typical high school relationship etiquette. High on drama, low on substance. Lots of making Jock jump through hoops while she took advantage of it. Jock takes after his dad.... he loves to spoil the people he cares about. Jock would tell me all the time about different things she liked that he did, but there was never a mention of anything she did for him that he liked. In fact, when ever he did mention something she had done, it was a reference to how she was upset with him (again) over some perceived wrong he had committed. Of course, this was always relayed to him via her best friend, in a text message. *side note..... this is one of those things that I do NOT miss about high school*

Well, last night I got home from work and Jock speaks up from the sofa where he's *mostly* engrossed in whatever XBox game he's playing. "Well, Mom... Tinkerbell dumped me. Again. After I thought we had gotten all this BS straightened out a couple of days ago." (it was another one of those "friend" conversations.... that got totally messed up in the translation. Go figure.)

Me: What happened this time?
Jock: She decided that I was flirting with other girls too much.
Me: Well, were you? (that's me.... always the mom to give him the benefit of the doubt... lol)
Jock: No! All I ever do is hug my friends. Same thing she does with her boy-friends. But nooooo, its ok for her but not for me? (segue into a rant of some sort here. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I sorta tuned part of it out, as its typical teenage angst. )
Me: Huh. Well, honey.... girls are like that. Basically, we suck. We're horrible girlfriends who do nothing but second guess your best intentions and make you work like dogs for our affection only to turn around and ignore you in favor of our girlfriends.

Ok. No, that's not what I said. :) I did tell him that he was way better than that, and that the next time he was thinking about committing to a girlfriend, he should make it one that didn't have to hide his existence. That would make it easier to have a relationship outside of school, making it easier to build trust and true affection. Or something like that. The end result was the same. Those tears I glimpsed in his eyes went away, and he laughed at me like I had no idea what I was talking about.

Which of course, I don't. Seeing as how I once WAS someone's girlfriend in high school. Nope, can't possibly give him an alternative point of view to make it all better.

Lucky me. Only three and a half more years of this.