Liquid runs warm inside my abdomen, a tingle in my right toes. A bare perceptible pulsating in my left lower back reminds me to sit up straight, but still I do not. The quiet in this darkened break room makes me linger.
I'm knitting a sleeve for a sweater, the first of my own design. It waits in a plastic bag, on the shelf to my right. I do not look in it's direction. There is no time to take it out to play right now, not right now.
"As a parent it is our job to protect our children." We've all heard this before, haven't we? But do we agree? For many of us this was the parenting style we go up with, but does that make it a universal truth? I think it is a well-meaning, but misguided belief. I believe that when we tell ourselves that our actions are for the protection of our children or for the protection of anyone else, we are fooling ourselves. The person we are protecting is ourself.
There is a line from a song which says, "your strength makes me feel less strong". Indeed. My role as a parent is not to protect my children, it is to prepare them to protect themselves, to handle their own lives, to equip them with the tools to make self respecting choices when faced with life's stressful moments and disappointments.
How do we do this? I suggest we look to the practice of medicine for ideas. We have discovered that protection from certain illnesses comes from exposure. We need only reflect on polio or pertussis to name only a few of the many examples to know this is true. To provide protection, we must be exposed to that which we want protection from. We protect by not protecting.
A primary role of my parenting then, is to inoculate my children to difficulty by allowing for their exposure to the setbacks, disappointments and grief which occur naturally as a consequence of their own choices and actions. I must not hinder their experience of hardship, in situation or in emotion. Instead of meeting these experiences with grimacing, I can choose to greet them with grateful anticipation for the learning and growth they may bestow.
It's a funny thing how the compulsion to argue with someone who is hurling insults at you is transformed once you have become aware and accepting of your shortcomings. Then it is like they are telling you that the sky is blue, but angrily. It's kinda comical. Only, I recommend you don't laugh at someone who its angrily criticizing you. Yeah, that doesn't go over too well.
I used to think I'd never loved or been loved. Now I see things differently. I see that there is love and loving action. For instance, there is no question. I love my children, but I do not always take loving action. Part of this is because I had not known what loving action was. I'd simply behaved as was modeled for me in the home of my childhood. However, as is typical in an alcoholic home, the behaviors I learned to associate with love were just the opposite and what I learned to associate with helping was actually harming. No wonder I have been confused.
When my thinking began to untwist, my perception of love became more confused. I could identify loving action, but as I reflected on the people in my life who had said that they had loved me, few loving actions were displayed by them or me. I concluded that none of us had known love.
Today I see that both are true. I see love as a paradox. I can love someone and simultaneously act unloving towards them. The unloving action stems from childhood learning, the behaviors modeled and the defense mechanisms I'd learned to employ for self-protection. Perhaps the key to finding a satisfactory love relationship is in finding a partner with the insight to recognize and the humility to admit to their unloving actions when they arise, as they will.
Since coming to view love in this manner, I feel some relief - relief of sadness, relief from resentment and the removal of obstacles to accepting others, others I had hardened myself to. I can trust that their love is or was true, even if our unloving actions made a close relationship untenable. I can simultaneously love them and accept the depth or shallowness our unloving actions allow. I have come to see the act of loving as the act of accepting another exactly as they are right now while maintaining the boundary appropriate for self-respect.
