In today's America, most relationships are changeable. Divorce the husband. Fire the employee. Quit the job. Move away from the pesky neighbor. But, no matter what, the bond between a child and a mother sticks. Even the adults who are estranged from their mothers talk about them all the time: in therapy or with their girlfriends and, even worse, at the batting cage. And we mothers never shut up about our kids -- either sharing the perfection of our toddler or the heartbreak of the son who lives on another continent and never picks up the phone. The mother-child relationship is almost impossible to abandon.
There are biological reasons for that. It was the farmer's kids who took over the hoe and the sickle when the parents got too old to carve out their own survival. Loving your kids and keeping them close was central to eating during retirement. But even in today's world of Social Security and disability benefits, the bond is hard to break. The pull of the connection is so strong for parents because, often times, our child activates within us a profound and life-changing experience of love. Think of those blissed-out mothers with their newborns strapped to their chests. When they wander into Starbucks, they resemble Snow White as she sang to the birds and gently brushed dust bunnies off the light fixtures. Those mothers look like angels and are irritatingly nice to everyone. That is because they are holding love.
Holding love is not the same thing as giving love. When I first looked into the eyes of my baby girl, my love was so intense that, for a flash here and there, I had the experience of being love. No matter if she pooped or barfed or slept on my chest all day, I could hang onto that blissed-out feeling for hours at a stretch. My energy shifted so much that I felt accepting and loving toward everything and everyone around me, and, most surprisingly, toward myself. Forgiveness was easy and other people's tempers and shortcomings didn't dent my bliss. I was calm, as if I lived in a bath of tenderness and compassion. In fact, when I held that love, all people appeared beautiful and I had great sympathy for their wounds and vulnerabilities. Nasty behavior seemed trivial, a quick rainstorm on an otherwise beautiful day.
It wasn't as if I had never thought about the importance of love. My parents never shut up about how they loved each of us. Every phone call ended with "I love you." Every note said, "Love, Mama." Even when my father wished me good night, he would holler up the stairs, "Love you." Those words slipped out between entries on his adding machine or his oiling of the kitchen table. But on many nights, even when I was a teenager, he came to my room and sat at the end of the bed and held my foot and shared something about his day or his perception of mine. It was during that time that he told me how scared he had always been that I could die when I had surgery for the heart defect with which I was born. And it was on one of those nights that he wondered where his temper came from and why he had cut off so many of his relationships.
When he sat there with me, even for a few minutes, he let me know that there was a place between his life and mine where we could meet and take a break from what we did and slip into who we were. It was a point of stillness, a place to remember that we were often moved by each other underneath his bills and my SATs. When he squeezed my calf through the blanket, we returned to a point of shared love and vulnerability. He was holding love for me, letting me know that he would come to a true part of himself and, from that place, look for the true part of me.
This is different from giving love, which implies a gift from one person to another. For that transaction to work, the receiver has to be game, which is certainly not the case with your average teenager or with a colicky baby. If the adolescent is obnoxious, we let ourselves off the hook, saying that the kid is out of our reach, unavailable to receive our gifts. Better to turn our maternal attention to a comedian on YouTube and wait a couple years until the hormones even out. That way, we might laugh at least a few times a day. But, what if, rather than looking away from our kids in that moment, we could close our eyes and turn our attention inside and remember what it felt like to hold love. That kind of love is a state of being, not a charm to distribute.
This is the sixth in a series of 10 posts by Paula Throckmorton about (re)discovering ourselves through motherhood. Follow along with the hashtag #HoldingLove!