We also don't fail eachother

an ode to terrifically tender love

Have you ever deeply, intentionally thought about how well loved you are? It’s a trip.

I mean it. It feels like a drug trip in a lot of ways. Like you are touching into this realm of consciousness that is completely unavailable when you’re picking the carton of milk off the shelf and sweeping the Rice Krispies off the floor. All the sudden, I connect the dots between those two things—the milk, the way I pour it into a separate little cup so the cereal doesn’t get soggy because she hates that, the cereal in the little bowl, a quarter of which I know will end up on the floor because that’s somehow just the way she eats, the way I set it in front of her before school. It’s powered by love, an indefatigable, even when exhausted, love.

And this love that powers the morning bowl of cereal is made of the same raw material as the love that powered my mother’s mothering. I know how potent my love is for them. Which gives me entirely new insight into how potent my mom’s love was/is for me. It’s enough to make me want to lie down in sea of Rice Krispies and cry.

I stumbled on this in therapy last week as I was processing how hard it was for me to leave my kids for a work trip. The trip was nearly perfect—I got to drink beers with old friends, do meaningful work with young activists, wander in and out of art galleries at my own dumb pace. In contrast, the leaving for the trip was hell. I felt like I was going to cry and puke all morning, and, at first, I tried to act like I was okay so that girls wouldn’t tap into their own anxiety. Eventually, remembering there is no fooling my daughters, I settled for, “I’m feeling two things at once—sad to leave you all and very excited for the trip.”

By the time I was on the plane, I was fine. In fact, at one point, I looked out the window at the clouds and felt this lightening bolt run through me: It is hard to leave my kids because I love them so much. I don’t just love them. I genuinely like them. I find both of their individual little essences, their completely unique souls, to be fascinating and delightful. I’m a 42-year-old woman, a mother of two daughters, and I am the luckiest person on the planet.

I couldn’t feel that on the ground, whining about yet another LOL doll accessory stabbing me in the bare foot. I had to leave. I had to feel the puke in my throat and the grief and the mama bear fight-or-flight—made more acute by the pandemic era—that runs through me every time I get on a plane. (My therapist encouraged me to stop beating myself up about the mama bear part, reminding me that we like to pretend we are not animals when really we very much are.) It was the full pendulation of love—the leaving and the returning, the fear and the delight, the sadness, and the joy.

Mothering is so defined by monotony. You do the same damn things day after day, week after week, month after month, until they imperceptibly shift and then you do a new set of the same damn things for a season. But the sacred—the vast, blue sky of love and gratitude—is always there, floating somewhere above you, between you, hard to touch.

And this isn’t just about mothering, of course. In this therapy session, where I found myself completely surprised by the direction of the conversation, I realized how painful it was to think about the vastness of all the love I receive. The love from my family, for sure, but also the love from my friends. My god, my friends. You wouldn’t believe the way they notice me, bring me unrequested lentil soup, send me handwritten letters about the creative process, answer my calls when I have no redemptive story yet about my pain, make me laugh and dance my ass off. It’s quieter than the mother love, but it’s made of the same stuff, the vastness of which is sometimes more shocking for how voluntary it is.

Listen, I know we fail at loving one another all the time. I know that this is one of the most universal human stories. It’s the reason so many of us, at least those who can afford it, end up in therapy, or on our knees in church, or under a highway shooting up some relief from the pain born of the absence of love. And trust you me, I’ve spent countless therapy sessions recounting the ways in which I wasn’t loved the way I wanted to be or the ways in which others were not receiving my love the way I wanted them to. This is not meant to be any kind of erasure of that reality—small for some of us, and dominant for others. It is a lifetime worth of material.

But it is to say—what about the milk in the separate cup so it doesn’t make the Rice Krispies soggy? Is there anyone at all who has loved you like that, even for a season. And if there is, have you spent any time at all trying to stare at that sky recently?

It will undo you. It’s very painful, in its own weird way, to even contemplate—like a campfire that warms you, but also threatens to singe your sweatpants and leave your ratty hair smelling like smoke. It makes you feel terrifically tender to think about how loved you are.

I’ve frequently looked at my kids’ sleeping and felt that familiar fear run through me; I send out a cosmic SOS to a god I don’t even really believe receives such midnight pleas, to keep them safe and healthy.

But the flip side of this desperation is that I have lived because I have been loved—fed and nurtured and read to and considered by my parents, by my brother, by my teachers; caressed and healed and delighted by my partner; seen and reconstituted and moved by my friends and neighbors. It’s been a grand investment—one so collective and often quiet that I risk overlooking it and underfeeling it.

Yes, we fail each other so much. But we also don’t fail each other. And sometimes when we fail each other it’s not even for a lack of love, but for a lack of capacity. We are limited, limbic creatures, but we are also terrifically loving, and lovable, and loved. That’s true whether we risk feeling the vast truth of it or not, but why not try?

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