Gratefulness for the Steep Cost of Loving

Parenting children is one of the contexts where you learn things about Love that you would never expect, things that you would never choose, things that you would never desire. 

If you know me on social media or in real life, you know how much I do love my children and how grateful I am to have them in my life. 

But people rarely talk about how much children help us to learn about love, to learn about our own limitations and to become reconciled to what it means to love both fully and without any hope that your love is enough. 

It is a seductive and pervasive story in the American romantic myths that LOVE WILL BE ENOUGH.  Specifically that you will complete someone or a few people and they will complete you.  That good parental love is enough to buoy anyone through anything.  That good friends can get you through anything.

None of these stories are true.  And BECAUSE they're not true, love is still the best way to be in the world.  Full hearted.  Full throated.  Full bodied.

Parenting babies was exhausting on a physical level, but manageable.  Parenting toddlers was (to me) just pure delight.  In this picture, taken roughly ten years ago, Jaelyn has just turned 10 and I have just turned 40.  By this time I could start to sense ways that I would not, could not be enough to make everything okay.  That my rules, my stories, my vision, my gifts could not be a sufficient inheritance to sustain my kids.  I am confident that those things, like the inheritance of love given to me by my parents, will help my kids on their journey. 

Sometimes comfort them, sometimes inspire them, sometimes remind them of something helpful.

Sometimes horrify them, sometimes anger them, sometimes sadden them. 

And this laboratory of love is only the beginning.  Because every other love has the same outcomes.  Our deepest and best loves are the ones that must teach us the cruelest and most painful lessons, sometimes through betrayal, sometimes through frustration, sometimes through a simple limitation. 

And for much of my life I looked at these disappointments, these losses, these changes, these crises as only a sad thing. 

But now I see plainly what a gift these costs are.  They render the value of the loving so much more plaintively.  They reverberate through so many other spheres of our lives.  They float like buoys that we sometimes can barely see and other times bump up against suddenly when the inevitable haze makes our passage slow and precarious.

An alternate name for many of these 50 posts would be: The Gifts of Aging. 

Aging is one of the most delightfully heartening processes I never could have expected. 

And loving is still the best thing I've done.