Love
You love your children. You love them hard. I once told my oldest children that I wouldn’t hesitate to bite flesh for them if they were ever in danger. I am left unchanged with that and some. However, children can hurt you. They hold the power to hurt you like no other can.
When they are young, their eyes sparkle with admiration for you; they admire you to the fullest. They clap, jump up and down, or at times do both when you serve them their favorite meals or surprise them with a small token of your thoughts while you were momentarily away from their side. However, my journeys of having five children have led me to embrace that it is challenging to always keep that game going. I refer to this emotional and spiritual filling of parenthood as a “game” because truthfully, I held faith that I would always have victory and it hurt like you know what when clearly, from the dismayed look, gesture, or unspoken words of my children, I was far from the gold, no gleam or sparkle to be found, no sound of applause to be heard.
There are times where life has you to address its own needs for attention and rather than giving and giving everything you’ve got to your children, you must tend to the demands of being not just a mother, but a wife, a homemaker, a career woman, and so forth. Your children inevitably must accept disappointment when you could not listen to their every words, follow their every move, or just be there for those every moments they would have wished you were present- physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And even in your presence, still, you could have been seen or felt as missing. You, in their eyes, have started to fail them, one look away, tuning out, or absence at a time. So, there goes the days and moments of sparkle and joyfulness. You start to see the very heart that loved you no matter what has changed for you. You thought to have unconditional love reciprocated, but it hits you that you only taught them to be conditional with all that you worked so hard to give them, all and everything you gave soon became not enough. Their love for you is tainted with growing, mounting memories of when your ears, eyes, body, and spirit failed to be there at their whim. Acknowledging such understanding hurts. There can be nothing done to go back. You just move forward, one silent and unseen tear at a time.
The comforting words and stories other women have journeyed give you hope and faith to stand and stay strong:
-a husband and wife who gave into sending their son to another part of the world where children were raised with tough love because they didn’t know what else to do during their son’s rebellious years of pre-adulthood; for the father to receive a card, bringing him to perhaps years-held tears upon his son apologizing for what he had put them through after becoming a father himself
-a daughter to tell me how much she used to argue constantly with both her parents growing up, sometimes right at each other’s face, only to now proudly claim both of her parents as her best friends now that she, too, had become a wife and mother
Sadly, there were those stories that left you wishing you never heard:
-a mother loved by many who hoped for her son to grow out of his drug addiction only to have found her last breath in his hands the very last time he came asking for money
-the daughter who fell for the wrong guy who lured her to human trafficking only for her own mother, relentless in getting her back, as she had stated to be one day a “miracle” was able to help her daughter get out and come back home
There was this one story I recalled, however, that I found humor and great strength in, that which exemplified strength and resilience, standing ground as a mother:
-a woman, recently having turned 100 years-old, meeting a roadblock at the airport terminal as she was to board on a plane due to the system’s inability to verify her age, sharing that she hadn’t talked to her daughter in 35 years and is fine with it
When you love and love hard, the irony is, deep inside, the heart is soft and vulnerable, taking the chance of getting hurt and torn to pieces one given moment of love at a time.
When you love and love hard, the unspoken price and acceptance in the heart is to not expect love in return.
That hard love is selfless. It gives and keeps on giving until one day, a whisper in your heart, mind, soul, and spirit speaks, “No more. You’ve given all you’ve got right now. Rest.” Rest you take.
Here’s to getting to 100, focused on getting on a plane because you have somewhere to go, not sulking under the covers, in the dark, because someone you dearly love has momentarily failed to love you back.
