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Dear Reader,
I wanted to write a check and send it to him, but it didn't seem like the right thing to do.
When my husband and I first met Greg, he was a massage therapist, a young guy in his late 20s and his dream was to go to chiropractic school and then start his own practice.
What a great kid. We encouraged him to follow his dream and when he finally enrolled in school, we continued to stay in touch with him. We'd exchange emails and when Greg would come back home to visit his parents around the holidays, he'd call and we'd get together.
Four years later, Greg graduated at the top of his class, but now he faces what every new grad worries about. "I've got this training and now how do I make a living? I need a job." He was worried, so over lunch we brainstormed about ways to market himself--to get his name out in front of the public. And he arranged to give some talks in front of groups.
After his first speech, sixty percent of the people filled out a "How-did-speaker-do" questionnaire, and the woman in charge of booking speakers told Greg that he gave an excellent presentation. But today Greg is playing the "Yes, but..." tapes in his mind.
"Ah, Suzanne," he said, "I'm out there promoting and people are giving me great feedback, but if I wasn't living with my parents right now, I couldn't afford rent. I'm broke, broker than broke. I get up every day, put on the one pair of dress shoes that I have, try to wear my good pants as many days as possible, I desperately need a new belt, but if I button my suit jacket no one will see it. People tell me I'm going to be a success, but if they only knew how broke I was."
I wanted to write him a check right then and there, contribute what I could to try to ease his worry, but then I remembered something my son told me one day, years after he'd had asked me to lend him some money for a business idea he wanted to pursue. My husband and I had helped him in the past, as parents do, and he was a hard working kid, but this time when he asked, I felt that it was time for him to completely go it alone.
"I never told you at the time, Mom," my son said, "but I was angry at you because you turned me down. But you know, looking back, it was the best thing you could have done for me, because it forced me to take the leap myself. And now I know that I did it all by myself."
It pains a mother to say no sometimes, and it was painful to hear how worried and scared our young friend Greg was. But I knew he'd make it through. So instead of a check, my husband and I listen whenever he needs to talk, we pick up the lunch check when we kick around some business ideas, but we did buy him one thing, a new wallet. His wallet was falling apart and we told him that he was going to need a new one pretty soon because we could see that success was rolling his way.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
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http://www.DearReader.com
READ THE CLASSICS: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, and enter the free Penguin Classic's Drawing. Go to: http://www.supportlibrary.com/nl/path_go.cfm?x=815&site=23
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