Love the One You're With

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
– Thomas Merton

Here’s the thing: when our kids are born, we think we love them just the way they are. We feel new heights of unconditional love that we at that moment realize we had not yet attained in any other relationship in life. But what begins to emerge as our kids tread past childhood is the fact that we do in fact have more expectations for them than we’d like to admit. We may say we love them no matter what, but how we feel about their progress relates a lot more to various conditions than we’d like to admit. Maybe we want them to succeed in the ways that we did, or avoid failing the ways we did. Maybe we want them to embody all the values and virtues we tried to instill so explicitly over the years. Maybe we hope they will look a certain way, carry themselves a certain way, compare to others a certain way.

All of us approach life with certain values, certain ways of doing things—beliefs and methodologies that are not so much a function of objective truth as personal history or preference. Often these kinds of values become implicit beliefs, heightened by the fact that we tend to surround ourselves with people who think and function like we do, or at least compatibly enough not to cause too much disturbance.

And then we have kids, who are so much their own selves. I am efficient, reflective, motivated by competition, task-oriented—I have kids who linger, are monosyllabic, wilt under pressure, are motivated by relationships. I don’t mind bending the rules and seeing the gray—I have a child who sees the world in black and white. I tend not to emote or take things too personally—I have a child who feels everything strongly.

When our kids are younger, it’s easier to applaud these differences. As they get older, it gets harder somehow—maybe because they are individuating the way teens do, with more of a push away. Maybe because it becomes clearer that these differences set them at times on an entirely different track in life than the one we had. It becomes clear that they are not us, that they will not walk through life as we did, that they will not respond to situations, will not think or feel or act as we do.

And when that happens, will I think oh what a shame—it would have gone better, looked better, been safer, if they had done things the way I understand, feel is best, or find easiest? Or will I think, what a gift? What a chance for me to sort out what I say I believe, and what I really believe? What a prompt for me to examine what I really want for my child?

Because in the end, who am I loving? Am I loving the person I want my child to be? Am I loving how my child will make me feel about myself? Or am I loving my child for who they are? Do I see my child for who they are?

I’m struck in the end by how conditional my loves are. I say I love my husband, my kids, my friends unconditionally, but in reality how I feel and therefore act towards them is much more dependent on something about me, than on my truly seeing them for who they are and loving them for that. Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say that I have decided to love without condition, but that learning to live into that is an ongoing process. Sorting out my own self-centeredness, sorting out my hypothetical and functional beliefs, is an ongoing process. 

And parenting is in some ways an intensified, microcosmic playing out of that process. Kids change so fast. The decisions they make affect so much. What they absorb from us has long-lasting effects. And in the end, we can say what we like, but what our kids absorb is how we feel, how we make them feel, based on what we really believe and value about them.