it's a serious game we play when bandying about the word "love" and abandoning it just as fast. We raise our children to have the same concepts as us but there are times when our children go rogue and decipher its meaning for themselves. It's friday night now and I been waiting to find just the right words to convey "love" and to relate an incident from earlier this week....
My feeble attempts to give my daughter, Lobo, a true definition of the word have escaped me. I know what I believe it to be and what it can manifest as but have yet to find that everlasting feeling of "Ahhhh" that comes from the picturesque sense of what we have all been brainwashed to believe love is. This week my daughter was glorified and then beat down and it was private and quiet and cruel. She is still suffering at the hands of someone's love and what they figured it was. However, love is not temporary. That much she and I know. How? Because I would LIVE for her, not just die or kill and she knows this. She knows I am ready to meet the makers of we, and I only stay because she beckons me so. Loving her means doing things I wouldn't normally or "want to" do but I do them because they benefit her, her alone. Love makes you do those things.
Only the young man she loves tells her his "love" is fading. He doesn't love her or think he will continue to do so in the future after telling her for almost four years he does and he wants to marry her. They kissed, the first time for both this summer, and now, he sees pretty things everywhere and his hormones have gone awry and he thinks he doesn't love her anymore. What did she do you ask? She got grounded. She was misbehaved and got herself punished and now faces certain double jeopardy because his love was not strong enough to endure a month more than the already four previous years to his betrothed. His love didn't cut the mustard. We got kicked to the curb. Me as his second mother and she as his partner, and it is sad.
I love this boy as my own son. And I am angry. Not at him but at the world in which our children grow up where they cannot count on love or friendship. He wants that much at least. But how can I teach her to put up with watching him dote on another and love another and share pet names with another and canoodle with another when he was her whole world and she is? How do you just be a friend after giving your heart to someone who stomps on it and then still wants you around to see them happy and you waste away and silently, shamefully grieve alone? I think it is an unfair request of people to expect that things will end so easily and without guilt for the person who fell short of knowing what love actually is.
Love is knowing your partner, child, parents, siblings, etc...are imperfect and continuing to support them and do things that matter to them because of it. Love is resisting the urge to poke fun of and publicly shame and humiliate the person you profess it for. Love is seeing another possible love interest and speculating they may have more "benefits" to you but staying committed to the one you are with because of the duration and the things you have shared. Love is doing the things you may not want to because that self sacrifice meant more to you than the meaningless shit you wanted to. A favor is love, a look, a devotion that NEVER fades. I left her father and still love that man. I loved her more and needed to protect her and gave up my relationship for her, that is love. Hell, I left many a man/woman/family member for her. I want for her to have a man,woman or partner who will love her that much that they put HER first. Every person deserves that...but, unfortunately we don't get that. We get the other people.
Even more difficult to accept is that I brought her into this world not knowing but now knowing that it will be hard for someone to accept her for who and what she is. He did...until this past Tuesday when he decided he didn't anymore. I hurt so much to see her hurting and doubting herself. Her decision to remain chaste is one every mother should be proud of. Only now she is still trying to come to terms with being "unloved" by him and it will take time and a mother's love to see her through. And her mother herself is even disbelieving in the human races capabilities of being able to understand what love really is and the sacrifices that go hand in hand with the good memories and the devotion and unending aspects of it. For now I hold her in my heart and pray the fates will be kind and not force that pain on her as I have tried to keep my jaded viewpoints away from her and to allow her to form her own perception. Let's hope...~mobe's love to her all and her all to her loves.
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