i miss u!

I opened my Facebook page one night last week - either Friday or Saturday, I can't remember. Almost instantly the chat box popped up and it said "i miss u!"

Now, here is your "awwwww" moment for the week. It was from my almost 16 year old nephew.

Go ahead, awwwwww. I don't think he reads the blog so he won't know I told anyone.

My first thought was that he didn't mean to send it to me. But he did and we chatted for a few minutes. Then he was offline just as suddenly as on. No bye, see you later, or anything. Just gone. I'm guessing someone walked in the room on his side and he didn't want them to know.

I checked with my sister the next day to make sure nothing was going on in his world. Yes, it is OK for a 16 year old boy to be sweet to his aunt but it doesn't happen all that often so I was still a little skeptical. Everything was A-OK.

On Monday morning, though, she called to share a story. A teen-age drama that she wanted to tell. (still had nothing to do with him being sweet to me, but it put a few things together). My nephew had kind of goofed up the week before and had to suffer the consequences for it. What he did isn't important. Hardly breaking news kind of stuff, but he still made a mistake. And at first he asked her to cover for him.

To her great credit, she said no.

My heart soared at this point.

She told him he would have to 'fess up and face the music.

And to his great credit, he did.

We talked a little more about it and her comment to me was this: "I'm glad he has you to be his friend because I have to be his parent." That is the one thing she and I heard all of our lives growing up - I'm not your friend, you have plenty of those. I'm your parent.

Hey, tough job, but someone has to do it.

And, as her sister, I told her how incredibly proud of her I was at that moment for taking that stand. I hear, almost daily, stories of parents going and talking to principals, or coaches, or other authority figures and trying to get their child out of some situation. Instead of using it for the life lesson that it is. I lose a lot of respect for those moms and dads. I have to think that the primary goal of being a parent is to prepare your child to be an adult. That takes a whole host of skills that have to be taught. Life lessons need to be learned.

We all make mistakes. Many, many times a day. But we have to own those bad decisions as well as the good ones. Decisions come with consequences. They bring personal responsibility. I'm not sure how people get through life if someone is always fixing their mistakes for them. Not very well, I'd think.

I like that I can be the friend. That I can support the parents and love the child and get to do all the stuff that parents don't always get to. (It does get me in trouble on occassion. I no longer give the kids scrambled eggs for breakfast when I go to keep them. That is not on my sister's list of regular schoolday breakfast foods. I got a phone call one morning after everyone had been dropped off that corrected my misconception.)

But it is cool that I get to be included in the process of helping these wonderful children turn in to incredible adults, at least I hope that is what they'll become!

And I like that my nephew misses me, and tells me so. Maybe he has learned some valuable life lessons already.