A few years ago, after a little wine and a great meal at my dining room table, a good friend asked the group, “What do you love?”
We all went around and shared what first came to mind. Adam share that he loved growing food for other people. I actually wrote about it here.
I was the last to go and my answer was easy:
Love.
I love love.
I love romantic love. Friendship love. Family love. I love the love in my life. I love to spread love. I love to see love in other people. I am okay with saying, I even love self love.
That 2014 me would have never imagined that just eighteen months later, the thing I loved the most would absolutely terrify me.
Theo was just days old and I was back in the hospital working through some major complications from childbirth. Getting him into the world wasn’t even remotely beautiful and the first few days were incredibly hard. Everything, from my health concerns to this little baby boy, was new and scary.
My health improved and we were released a few days later. It was a relief after a week and a half at the hospital. But, it was short lived. At home, discovering our new normal opened a new reality: I love this baby… fiercely. But, this love is scary.
All of the sudden the stakes are so much higher with love. The joy and the responsibility of raising a child coupled with the fact that they can so easily be hurt is almost too much. This love is risky. And, it petrifies me.
The week before Senior Prom we had an assembly- like many schools do- about drinking and driving. Our young principal, with a shake in his voice, shared the love of a parent is different than any other love. Different than boyfriend girlfriend love. Different than sibling love. Different than husband wife love. The love a parent has for their child is different- stronger- than all of those.
I tried to imagine loving something more than my parents. My sister. My brother. My friends. My boyfriend. I couldn’t. I couldn’t for eleven years.
Eleven years later to perhaps even the day… I learned he was right. And, that shake in his normally powerful voice, was his heart… and fear.
I have thought about Adam dying a handful of times. It would be awful. Terrible. I get tears in my eyes just thinking about what I might say about him in a post on social media or what his funeral would look like.
(I nervously confessed these thoughts to him recently, afraid he would think I was completely strange. He said, “Don’t worry. I think about you dying all the time.” So, I think these thoughts may actually be semi-normal.)
Then, I look past the funeral.
Sure, I would be forever changed because of it. And, definitely broken for a long time. But, I think I could be happy again. I think about how I may even marry again.
But, if something happened to one these babies? I would have to be medicated. For a very. Long. Time.
This love is so different than the loves I thought I knew. No one prepared me for this.
This love is sharper and so is the world. I do my best to soften the edges and round the corners, but sending them out into it is an internal battle every day and I think it is one of the few things that won’t get any easier with time.
So, this love that fills me up to the point of ache is a love that I am learning to live with. I have to. All parents do. And, that is what gives me hope. Knowing that there are other parents facing the same demons every day gives me comfort. Because it means their children are loved intensely.
And, that is what this sharp world needs: Kids loved enough to go out into it with more love.
This love that scares me? I am trying my best to make friends with it. Because this great love has opened my heart to a love I didn’t even knew exist.
I am so thankful for this love.
The stakes are higher; but, so is the reward.
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