Karma, Weren't You Paying Attention?
When I was 19 years old, I was a little lost. Maybe a lot. I was living in New York City trying to become an actress as well as making grand attempts at figuring out my pseudo-grown up identity. Although I learned volumes, can still perform a damn fine Shakespearean monologue and gained some much needed street cred, the growing up didn't go so well. I'm not sure that it's supposed to. You know, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
Anyway, I didn't do such a bang up job at being a big girl right off the bat. Looking back, I felt let down. I wondered why no one in my family stepped up to help me when I was clearly in crisis. Hello? *tap tap* Is this thing on? It may have been because my dad left us, my mother lost her hold over me at an early age and still had two younger daughters to raise. I was in charge of me and as I mentioned, it wasn't storybook. But I had extended family. Why didn't someone try to reach me?
Fast forward a few hundred years and I recently found my nephew in a similar state of affairs. My husband's brother's son was in a bad situation and I offered to help. Come live here. Get a job. Go to school. Use our truck. Get on your feet and your life on track. Yeah, maybe I was trying to right the wrongs of my own rough start but there's nothing horrible about trying to give someone something you wished you'd had, right? That's where I was coming from when I reached out to my nephew this past June.
This week, just days from his 19th birthday and ten weeks after moving in here, I dropped him back off at the airport and wished him good luck. The in between? It didn't go so well. No job, no school, damaged property and, in my opinion, a screwy sense of entitlement laced with a huge lack of any sort of motivation which I could only translate as disrespect.
It wasn't all his fault though. My biggest flaw was that I thought my nephew would do what I would have done if I was his age and presented with the same opportunity. I reached out because I know what a difference it would have made if someone had done it for me all those years ago and I figured the universe would make it work out. You may have already have guessed what I had to learn the hard way: No one is carbon copy of you.
Now that the situation is behind us there are a lot of take-aways, including hurt feelings. What went down was the complete opposite of what I envisioned when that little voice in my head said, "Kimberly, you should offer to help him. Don't you remember how you felt when you were that age?"
Yeah, I remember but what happened, Karma? Weren't you paying attention?
Kimberly Petro writes about her life in The Ding Dang Woods on her personal blog, Petroville. Come visit. An original DC Metro Moms post
