Friday, May 16, 2014

(Spoiler Alert)


It is funny, when I look back at my posts it seems I cry a lot.  I even have an unpublished post about my brother who passed away and how little things make me think of him and some of them make me cry.  I'd like a nice photo to go with it before I post it.  But then I worry, will people think all I do is cry.  Rest assured, I don't.  But I do cry a lot.  TV shows, movies, commercials, youtube videos, you name it.  My children find it comical how easily I cry.  I don't think I was like that when I was a child and I wonder when it all began.  When did I begin to cry at the drop of a hat.

Perhaps when I became a mother. I did find that all the fears I had for myself previously switched and became fears for my children.  (Again, not that I am spending all my days paralyzed by fear.)  And perhaps that is why advertising executives get paid the big bucks.  They know how to pull the heart strings and the simplest way is to play on the empathetic emotions of a mother.

Perhaps when life began to throw me curve balls.  As we get older, we have more experiences under our belts and not all of them are good.  I remember saying to a friend in University I had never been to a funeral, then I wound up going to 2 in the following month!

But all my tears are not tears of sadness.  Some are tears of joy, tears of laughter, tears when something is just so beautiful or moving that you just can't stop the flow.  Most of my tears are for when things just don't seem fair.

For the last few months, my girls and I have been working our way through 9 seasons of How I met Your Mother.  Last night we had the two final episodes to watch.  (If you are interested in this series and have not seen the ending, you might want to stop reading.)  Finally after years of bad dates and disastrous relationships, Ted meets the girl with the yellow umbrella, the mother.  She is perfect for him, she gets him and she immediately realizes how great Ted is.  Final episode rolls around and she dies!!!! Yes, she dies!  Well of course I began to cry, but I was also enraged, how could the writers do this.  It just seemed so unfair.  This character had waited so long to find 'the one' and then she dies.

I know that life can imitate art and vice versa, but this story line is all too familiar to me.  I know of real life stories where love took a long time to come and then death swoops in and the one person is left to grieve.  It is not fair.  Just not fair.  Sometime life can be so painful and confusing.  It is nice to take a break from reality, watch the Princess find Prince Charming and ride away into the sunset.  How many children want to hear that Frog got squished by a car, while Toad ran back to get the kite, not many!!

I guess the whole HIMYM thing just struck a chord with me, hit too close to home.  I watched my darling sister lose the love of her life to cancer and I can tell you, it wouldn't be a story line I would have gladly written into any script.

I don't need art imitating life.  Life can be messy enough on its own.