Campfyre Stories

When Spawn was around 7 or 8 years old, I took a vacation without him.  When I came back he asked me if I had missed him.  Even though I knew it would be hard to take at that young an age, I felt that it was an important point that needed to be made.  "No, I didn’t miss you, I was having way too much fun to miss anyone."

It took a little more explaining than the one sentence, but he did come to understand the point.  When you’re distracted and enjoying everything that goes on around you, you simply do not have enough TIME to miss people or places or even things.  The only time we ever miss anyone or anything is when we have the time to think about what it is that we don’t have.  So, for example, I’m a lot more likely to miss someone when THEY go on vacation and I lose my standards of communication with them than when _I_ go on vacation and am distracted by whatever adventure I have embarked upon. 

Even those fleeting moments of "I wish so-and-so were here to share this with me," isn’t so much missing them and I put it in a separate category.  Those feelings of wanting to share an experience are less about missing their company (which is usually based in a dissatisfaction with your surroundings) and more about wanting to share your own enjoyment of the moment (which is a desire to remove them from their daily routine and into your unique situation). 

When Spawn came home from his 2 weeks in Michigan, he was filled with stories of all the wonderful things that he did while he was there.  I’m sure we haven’t reached the end of the stories, as they will likely last for weeks.  One story he told me was about "The most expensive phone call" that he received from his father, who is currently in England.

So I asked, "Why did he call?  What did he want?" and Spawn’s reply was "Well, I don’t actually know…"  It was at that point that we both kind of decided that maybe he wasn’t having a very good time (or as good a time as he could be having) and found himself actively missing Spawn.  I’ve trained the boy well.  Instead of being touched at the sense of "Aww…  he was thinking about/missing me," he said it was too bad that he had the time to miss anything about home.

I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine a week or so ago.  He was pretty horrified that I would tell a 7 year old that I hadn’t, in fact, missed him while I was away.  Though he prides himself on his honesty, his response was "That’s one case where I think you should have lied."  But I find that children are pretty able to accept things that seem unpleasant on the surface if you take the time to explain how they are not actually unpleasant all the way through.

When I conveyed that conversation to Spawn (it took place while he was away), he said, "Before you even ask…  I didn’t miss you,"  to which I replied, "Good.  That means you were too busy having a good time."  He smiled and told me that this was the first time he really understood it from experience.  That he had understood it conceptually, but that it was nice to experience it.

Even though he didn’t say it, I have a feeling it was also pretty freeing to not have to answer the question of "Did you miss me," but even more so, to know that admitting that he hadn’t was not only acceptable, but something to be celebrated.