Things my mother should have warned me about.

My mother always told me to not play with matches because I could set the house on fire, and we could all die.
She told me to always look both ways before crossing the street because I could easily get hit by a car and die.

My mother told me not to take any medicine without her permission because I might take too much medicine, which would cause my liver to fail, which would cause my body to shut down, which might then cause me to die.

my mother warned me about all the things that could kill me, but looking back I wish she would have warned me about the things that would make me want to die. 

I wish she would have warned me about all the girls in high school who never actually said anything, but could make you feel so hideous, and little and so unimportant, you would starve yourself until you couldn’t move, in a desperate attempt to be beautiful. 

I wish she would have warned me about the fact that boys with nice smiles and pretty words can also have cold eyes and greedy hands. And I wish she would have told me that they would trick me into giving them everything I had, so they could then leave me body as nothing more than a graveyard of regrets, with tombstone’s marked with their lies.

I wish she would have told me that one day I would fall into a bottom-less abyss of self loathing and incomprehensible sadness that would make me want to not look both ways when crossing the street.

I wish she would have warned me, but nevertheless I learned, so instead when I have a daughter, I will take her new face into my calloused hands and look into her wide brown eyes still shining with innocence and laughter and tell her “Baby, this life is hard, but you are going to make it. There are things that are going to happen that are going to make you want to set yourself on fire, or drink a bottle of pretty pink poison, but I can promise you that that there’s more to life than bruised knees and bleeding wrists.”

My mother may have warned me about the things that would kill me, and I learned about the things that would make me want to die, but not her.
She we learn about the things that will make her want to live.