Innocence Lost - The Siblings

I "stole" the following blog from a better writer than me. How poignant this mom is that she can put this level of emotion into words. I have added "a diary of a mom" in my links on the right. She is worth reading and following.

Innocence lost – The Siblings
March 22, 2012


Their innocence lost, they had to be braver and more generous than children should have to be. ~ Eustacia Cutler, speaking of her other children – Temple’s siblings.

My heart is breaking.
It’s too much tonight.
These kids – these amazing little people – carry the weight of the world on their far too fragile shoulders.
They live in a world that we all lament is too slow to evolve. Yet they have sped past it at lightening speed – self-actualizing like a trick of time-lapse photography – Behold! Before our very eyes the caterpillar, the chrysalis, the butterfly – all in the blink of an eye because they live a life that demands that they have wings.
But sometimes the weight – the weight of this fast tracked evolution is just too damned much.
These babies are pushed into a wisdom so far beyond their years. We demand from them – and they continually surprise us with – a spiritual maturity and depth of understanding that leaves their peers standing in the dust on the playground. And while we celebrate their maturity – An old soul! A tiny sage! Oh, how grown-up you are! – we’ve handed them the double-edged sword of insight – that which makes the plodding emotional development of their peers a frustrating and terribly unfunny joke.
An understanding of human nature that forces their eyes to see in stark relief the cruelty that passes for interaction between children their own age. An integrity that forces them to stand against injustice where they find it – and don’t they find it everywhere? And don’t we? We, the people who have walked this path with their siblings, who blinked and winced against the blinding light that came upon us in a flash and forced us to see – to really, truly, painfully see – how we treat one another.
And as hard as it was to come to terms with our new lives under that light, we came armed with the accumulated tools of a lifetime. With some measure – albeit dramatically varied among us, but nonetheless at least some collected measure – of finesse with which to face the cruelty that we could no longer not see. And along with the finesse, the luxury of choosing with whom we will engage and when we will, Gambler style, know when to walk away.
But our kids – these siblings who see so much, understand so much, who have hearts eight times the size of their fear – they have no tools. They stand unarmed before a world of children that would chew them up and spit them out by lunch-time if it might get them closer to the cool kids’ table at lunch.
Fifth-grade girls try on different personalities like they’re changing their clothes. But our kids, our beautiful, wise, precious kids see through the flimsy facade. And they search and they search for any shred of integrity because they’ve learned – just as we have – that what’s REAL is all that matters. And they lean into friendships, diving deep, fumbling to find what lies beneath the facade. They give their hearts the only way they know how – in full. And when those hearts are carelessly tossed aside they crumble the only way they know how – completely. Because what we give so too we stand to lose. And practiced as they may be as defender – and no matter the relish or reluctance with which they play the role, they know it by heart – they have no defense left for themselves.
Because they know too much. They know that barbs disguised as jokes aren’t funny. They know that insecurity fashioned into ammunition hurts. They know that careless words leave indelible marks.
And with a sense of right and wrong so deeply entrenched as to be inescapable, they walk out into the world brandishing their pistol at the first sign of unfairness, injustice – their fingers itchy to pull the trigger. But the gun shoots blanks.
And in the middle of it all is the desperate fight to stay under the radar – not to draw attention because by God isn’t it enough that they live under the unbearably unpredictable spotlight of Oh My God This Is So Embarrassing – and yet – and yet! – every bit of their desperate desire for anonymity fights with their even more desperate need for attention. Because we all need attention. And there is never enough to go around.
And they leave the minefield at home and run headlong every day into a landscape dotted with overt and hidden perils. A land, where just as we do, they see it all. Because they, like us, can’t help but see vulnerability. They sniff it out like bloodhounds and attach to it because it’s what they know – and guarding it from danger is the role they play. And because their hearts are stretched so far beyond the boundaries of their precious youth, they feel so deeply the sting of knowing that each and every human being matters and each and every human being feels and thinks and sees and smells and knows what’s being said about and around and above and through them and they know – just as WE know that each and every boy is some other mother’s son and each and every girl is another mother’s daughter – that so too each might be loved by a sibling.
And by God, how would they want someone else to act in their shoes, on their behalf should it be their sibling who is being hurt by careless words and not-so-harmless harmless pranks? And always, always they take the perspective of the other because how often – how often? – do we tell them, show them, demand of them, that they must?
And where are THEY in all of this? Where do THEY live and shine and breathe and say Screw it, I don’t care what you think. Where are they to draw their OWN lines, make their OWN decisions, find, somewhere in a world that feels so far out of their control the ability to chart THEIR OWN course?
Where do they get to stop pleasing and be pleased?
Stop worrying and be worried about?
Stop defending and be defended?
I know they will change the world.
I know that they already are.
But in this moment, it’s too much.
My heart is breaking.
These kids – these amazing little people – carry the weight of the world on their far too fragile shoulders.