Green Day and the expectations of a child

Ian got a Green Day t-shirt for keeping his eye patch on for 4 hours straight. He's got ambliopia and the patch is helping the weak eye get better...
Anyhow, he got the shirt in the middle of Mid-Winer break (he's 6) so he wanted to save wearing it til school got going again. 5 days go by and the 6 year olds expectations of the reactions grew. The day came and he proudly wore the shirt outside his fleece jacket so the jacket stayed on all day and he said was a "little hot"...thing is, one boy said that wasn't even Green Day on the shirt and one of his good friends didn't say anything about it...he tells me this with tears in his eyes...it broke my heart. He was so excited to show off his cool new shirt and it didn't pan out for him...
and i used to think going to work everyday was hard. Parenting tears people apart if they let it. Teach your children well, but let them suffer to toughen them up for the real world??? If ida known that its not the raising the kids, teaching them how to read, good manners and such....that the pain was seeing one's child suffer and knowing theres nothing one can do is truly the most difficult ting ive ever had to deal with. I can't imagine what he was going thru all day....

This past week has run us through the ringer. We went to a memorial service for my mother-in-law on the day of her 58th wedding anniversary. Then my oldest kid turned 18. Holy crap.

So first, the memorial...or more what losing someone close a second time feels like.

When I lost my Dad a little over 5 years ago, my views on religion, the afterlife and why we feel the need to believe in something changed radically. I had always thought I would know when someone I cared about died. Like a ripple in the Force I suppose. I talked to him on the phone the night before the final surgury (heart issues). Then, 18 hours later my brother called from 2200 miles away telling me he was gone. Never felt a thing. One day I was talking to him, next day he was gone.....just gone. No more conversations about my kids, the goats, the Spurs, the Navy...nothing. All the history was gone. And I didn't even feel him leave. 5 years later and there's still nothing. I gew up believing in spirits and souls and such, but now that I've experienced that kind of loss, it's just different.