July 2021

Love the one you are with 
When you love someone completely, you realize that love is not measured by happiness alone. If it were….we would all be screwed. Love is an investment, it is time and compromise and fear and beauty and frustration, all rolled up into a confusing word that doesn’t begin to explain it. My daughter loves to play a little verbal game of “I love you the most” with me and it makes me giggle every time. As a child, the love you have for your parents is unwavering, regardless of treatment, a child looks to their parent for the early years with no judgment, an open heart and completely bias adoration. I know what most of you are thinking, and yes, they act like they don’t hear a word you say and treat you like hired help, ignore 90% of the words coming out of your mouth and make your life as hard as humanly possible sometimes but I am telling you, they love you unconditionally. ‘

As a parent we get a blank check for love and it isn’t fair, we really do nothing to deserve it other than forfeit everything we are. Really though, we are handed this adoration, this love and this pedestal and this fact alone is what makes me work so hard to earn what I was given for free. My daughter looks at me with her half toothed smile (the tooth fairy has been very busy!)  and her big blue eyes and says “I love you more mommy” and all I can do is smile. I smile and I hold her and I kiss her golden curls and I close my eyes to breath in this moment. Love is one of the most malleable words in the English dictionary, it has no real meaning and yet it means everything. What love is to a child can change from day to day, and what love is can be taught, taken away, stolen, given or even manufactured. Yet when I remember being a child, the feeling of loving my parents is so pure, nothing preventing me from falling in completely to the memory of being a child, adoring my parents and just needing them to love me as much as I loved them. In my tiny egotistical mind I can imagine thinking “I create art for them and make my bed, why can they not love me as much as I love them?” And now as a parent I look at my beautiful girls and cannot even begin to explain how I never knew love until I saw their faces. So my darlings, I know you love me more and yet you will never know, until you know, that I love you most. 

Love in a way that is internal and external all at once, has no limits and has no end. I do not know what life looks like with a teenage girl and I do not know what life looks like as a parent of a parent and yet I know I will love these little girls the most, forever and ever, to the moon and back, without fail, without question and without pause. There is so much advise to give and so many pieces of the parenting puzzle to discover so for today, just love them, even when you want to scream, remember the beauty and remember the pedestal and love because you can and because they do, without question.