Stories about Love: Episode 5

 

IF

You love

a child

(like I do)

Then this Episode of Stories on Love

will resonate.

Love for a child is so powerful...

It can make you crazy, or it can heal you.  Sometimes both in the same 30 minute span of time.

I have two pieces to this "Mom Heart".  One is called ALEX and the other is called ANI.  

Try as I might, I cannot ever disconnect my attachments as they are.  If you who are reading this are a parent then you too will understand the love that exists.  The question is, how do you explain it in words?  This Blog entry may end up being more poetry than prose.

Alex and Ani made me a Mother- well...ok, the first child makes you a mother.  The second and any that follow just give you more opportunities to practice what you have learned from the first.  But being a Parent or a Parental Figure in a child's life is so meaningful to the person they will become.  It is a piece of the development.  You know:  Nature and Nurture?  Some parents offer both, while others (like in the case of adoptive parents and absent parents), offer one but not the other.

For the sake of this article, I am speaking of ALL persons that influence the raising of a young person to be an adult.  This includes any type of guardian or step-parent or Foster Parent or even Mentors and Teachers.  

So in these instances, LOVE = BOND

In the case of how this kind of love affects us the person WE are is based on the BOND that we create with a mostly helpless undeveloped fellow human that depends on us.  This teaches us what WE are made of.

I definitely did not know myself before I had kids.  The first one came and it was mostly fun- I had a lot of help.  My daughter came into a house full of people that doted on her and adored her.  Her two sisters, their husbands (at the time maybe boyfriends, but they are still in our lives now), her father and many other family members.  Everyone adored her and she was the center of attention almost all of the time.

I relinquished many things to the decisions of my stepdaughters or Annika's dad.  I happily added my part and I thought everything was good...and it was...except that it wasn't.  I wasn't actually teaching my daughter any values, because I wasn't really in touch with what I valued.

By the time my second child came into the world, I was beginning to open up to what it meant to be a truly spiritual person.  I began slowly over the first few years of his life, to explore these places in my heart and mind and and to make changes.  Those changes took hold and I went in a very new direction.  My son's early childhood life was MUCH different from my daughter's.  He still had the adoring sisters and his father but he had a mother in a great deal of personal turmoil and painful transformation.  He eventually had a new stepdad.  So now TWO dads, who have completely different value systems from one another.

But nothing is impossible with LOVE because LOVE is basically MAGIC!

My children save me from hating myself.  I know that could be seen as a heavy burden...but it is a two-way street.  They give me value as a mother (not as a human...I had to find that separately).  I take the love I learned from this bond of mother and child, and I GIVE it to everyone I meet!

I become everyone's mother.  Because being a Mother was the FIRST time I really grasped what LOVE was.  No one bonded with me like that when I was a kid.  I don't know for sure what the early years of my life were like but those shadows will likely never have their chance in the sun.  Meaning I will never know.  And I have accepted this.

But my children WILL know...in fact, they are the reason I do all of this writing.  Someday, these stories will be my Legacy for them.  They WILL know themselves.  They WILL have ALL of the answers.  This is my version of love.  And I learned it from my children.

~Namaste

Lilac