Love and loss

Dear Sprout,

Right now, your Uncle Booger is going through his first big heartbreak, and it has me thinking about someday when I’ll have to console you through the same thing. It already makes my heart ache to think about you hurting that way, but its pretty much inevitable. You almost never spend the rest of your life with your first love, and if you do, my little man, you’ll be a much luckier person than your mom and dad have been. While I’m thinking about it, let me write you the advice I will hopefully give you when the horrible day finally comes that you come to me, bawling your eyes out because some pretty little lady has broken your heart.

The gist of it is rather trite: it will get better. When you’re sitting in the middle of it, it feels like the world is ending, but once you find your way past it, you finally see that it worked out for the best. I’m not saying you’ll forget your first love, because you won’t. I am as in love with your father as any one person can love another, and sometimes I still have dreams about my first love. Your first love is a part of you forever, because they are your first. But one day you will find that it didn’t end because there was something wrong with you, or that there was even necessarily something wrong with them, but because you weren’t meant for each other. You have to move past that first love to find the person God made you for, but that first love makes you the person that God made for your forever love. I hope that made sense. Your father and I would not have been the people we are today if it were not for the people we loved before we met, and if it hadn’t been for all that heartbreak, we would have never had you.

So I hope someday, when your little heart is breaking, you’ll take my advice, and you’ll feel the pain of the heartbreak for what it is: refining fire that will make you the man you’re supposed to become.