Our parents have taught us many things throughout our lifetime. They’ve taught us how to be kind, how to ride a bike, how to read, how to fry an egg, the list goes on. However, there are some things our parents didn’t warn us about.

Our parents didn’t warn us about heartbreak. They might’ve said it wouldn’t be fun, or it would suck but they didn’t say how much it would hurt or affect us. They didn’t tell us there would be days we lay in bed depressed never wanting to get up or nights we lay awake at three in the morning with a pain in our chest and tears that would not stop. They didn’t tell us every sad song we heard would relate to our situation. They didn’t tell us this pain would envelope our mind. Our parents never warned us that losing someone would feel like your heart was ripped out of your chest and the pain would never end. They never wanted us to go through this.

Our parents didn’t warn us about love. Yes, we’ve been shown all the corny movies (talking to you here, Disney), read all the fairytales, listened to all the love songs, but they never told us how it would take up our every thought. They didn’t tell us that every move we made would be carefully thought through about how it would affect who we love, how we want to shower them with how much they mean to us. They didn’t warn us that we would want to spend every second with this person. They didn’t warn us how much we would miss this person after one day apart. They always wished for us to find this magical love, but they never explained what would happen to us. They didn’t tell us that maybe we are crazy in love and then it stops all of a sudden, and months or years later you have it again. They didn’t tell us that being in love is also hard. They didn’t tell us that saying, “I love you” for the very first time would be one of the scariest moments of our life.

Our parents did teach us to hold our heads up high when times got rough. They taught us to fight for what we believed in and always told us to never allow anyone to make us feel less than we are. Granted these are all easier said than done and I can only imagine how hard some of these lessons may have been to teach or watch us learn for ourselves. Our parents want the best for us and will always be rooting for us. Some lessons we need to learn on our own and we may need to experience things more than once in order to understand the importance of why it happened. Our parents don’t want us to experience the hurt and the heartbreak. They want us to be happy and never face any hardships but in reality those hard times are essentially what make us stronger. We need to push ourselves past obstacles in order to help teach our future children and ourselves that being strong is what you need to survive in this world. Nothing is handed to you; you have to work for it. Times may get hard but as long as you have a good support group (or even just you, yourself) can get through it. That’s what our parents taught us and I know I am grateful for that.