This little gingerbread cookie jar is sitting on my counter right now. She has some very yummy oatmeal cookies in her belly. She has a big smile on her face, too. She looks pretty harmless really, don’t you think? Go Gordy sure did! So he got right up close to her, ready to give it a try.
Go Gordy is like me. Open heart, open mind, willing to take a chance. Gordy snuggled up close, opened his mind, his arms, and his heart, and started falling in extreme like with her.
He’s a smart little bear, and noticed right away how different she was from him, but he thought perhaps it would work out. He was excited because they even had the same initials!
He started by sharing his adventures with her. She stared straight ahead and didn’t say much back, but she was smiling. He decided not to be discouraged, and continued.
He showed her his funny pictures on Facebook. But she wasn’t interested in seeing them; in fact, she didn’t even really look. He said, “But Wait! These are my friends, they all like me, see?” Pretty quickly there was no way to avoid that she was kinda cold about the whole thing. She couldn’t understand why he’d make friends that way. That wasn’t how SHE made friends, so they didn’t matter. Where were his REAL friends and why was he posting pictures up there like that?
He shared his music with her, dancing and flapping his arms. She didn’t stop smiling, but that didn’t move her either.
He went ahead and stuck his hand inside, thinking maybe she’d enjoy sharing a cookie with him. And that’s when the lid came down on his little paw. Ow! That HURT. He tried to talk it out, but he’d been there before. He listened for her to admit she’d been judgmental. Instead, she denied it and went on smiling. Now sweet Gordy was on alert.
Still he tried to snuggle up to her, but now her arm was poking him right in the heart. He couldn’t seem to get across to her that this was painful. After another stab, Gordy had to face the truth. He’d been looking for love in all the wrong places.
You see Gingerbread Girl has a big smile and she even has some sweet yumminess all the way on the inside. But the hardness between her smile and what she’s got inside isn’t something Gordy has the strength or willingness to break through. And he’s pretty sure Gingerbread Girl isn’t interested in being “broken” or changed either. Best to just walk away and spend his time enjoying life instead of fixing others. So he gave up the Gingerbread Girl, even though it made his heart sad and his tummy hurt.
Gordy and I have gotten quite wise this year. We’ve both made a decision to keep our hearts and our minds open, so we don’t miss out. But we’re willing to leave a cookie jar behind when the smile on the outside turns out to be too far separated by hardness from the soft yummi-ness inside, even if it IS really shiny.
We know our Special Someone is out there. In the meantime, we’ll enjoy sweetness where we can find it, and watch out for those hard lids coming down.
~ cj 2011.11.04
For those of you who don’t follow me on Facebook (http://facebook.com/cjromb, http://facebook.com/gogordy, and http://facebook.com/addinaction)…you might not know Go Gordy.
Go Gordy is my teddy bear. Every day, he has a little something to say. Most of the time, it’s fairly applicable to whatever’s going on in my life. Today was DEFINITELY no exception.
This is today’s picture of Go Gordy. I posted it with the caption “Looking for Love In All The Wrong Places”. I also added “Sometimes Love Is Hard”. And on my page I put: “Go Gordy got so excited by the smile and the yummi-ness he saw inside, that he missed the hard exterior between them. I get that.”
Unintentionally, this post turned out to be an exact mirror of how I was feeling, after walking away from a very short relationship/friendship last night. In fact, all day, the analogies between this post and recent relationship attempts kept coming up for me so strongly that I decided I wanted to say more about it than just my comments on Facebook. So this was my blog about it.