Disillusioned

My favourite thing about you has always been your genuine interest in other people and ability to be enthusiastic in sharing their joys.  As a kid, I loved seeing you spend hours crocheting three baby blankets for each of your nieces' babies.  When I was a teenager, I realized that the way you could rejoice when someone shared their good news with you on the phone, was not a universal personality trait.  When we were finally able to tell you that we were going to have our first baby, I am sure you were every bit as thrilled as I was.

I longed to have that ability too - to be selflessly and authentically supportive of someone else's joys and triumphs.  I have always tried to see the many ways that I am like you, searching for that gift in myself.

A few years later, my observations seem to be shedding such a different light.  I see cynicism and skepticism and my childhood image of you darkens around the edges.  I see relationship rifts and a strip of perfection is peeled off of the ideal version of you I have known.  I see self-righteousness and believing the worst of others.  As my tears fall, I reach for one of those baby blankets, finger the crocheted edges and dream of the time when what I used to know of you was all I knew of you.

You are still who I once knew, but you are also more.  And I am learning to love the you I know now.