Mentor Me

I recently signed up with a program to be a mentor/big sister/friend to an effervescent, toootally hip 13 year old. Now, this young lady’s parents are both crack addicts, they have been in and out of her life…well, her whole life. She has been bounced back forth between her grandmother and her mother. Her father makes occasional appearances as well.

So, yesterday was our first sort of “bonding” time. We went and got ice cream. She was amazed by the number of toppings at Cold Stone. She is also very chatty and open about teachers, friends, boys, hobbies, etc. We talked about her ex-boyfriend (total jerk!) her friends, the pool, shopping, favorite colors (hers is blue) and in the midst of all this, she starts talking about her mother. We’re laughing and having a great time and she launches into this story about how “loaded” her mom is all the time and how one time she fell asleep in her cereal bowl. And here’s what floors me…my men tee is laughing about this as if it were the same topic as my favorite color. Its light, it’s normal. She’s doing her best to make lemonade out of her rotten lemons, and this breaks my heart, a little. More than anything, though, it amazes me and makes me want to be very careful with this fragile, impressionable, but amazingly resilient young person who is sitting in front of me with ice cream dripping down her chin and giggling like the school girl she is despite the absolute crappiness that fate/God/Whatever has dealt her.

This is magnificent to me and I don’t know what her life will be like in couple of years. I don’t know what bad or wonderful decisions she will make. I don’t know what paths she will follow, but I want her to do well and fall in love and work hard and learn to trust people again…and again…and again because that will always be an uphill battle. Life is filled with people who let you down, everyone knows that, but there also some rare souls that will lift you up. That offer a wall to lean against instead of a cliff to fall off of. I want to help her trust in that. I want so much for this spunky kid (after just an hour of talking to her!). This is new to me, to want the world for someone I barely know, but I do. I absolutely do.