I Could Never Love

How learning to eat these words has been the best surprise of my life.

Interrupting the Pathway to Bold Change series with this special Valentine’s Day message.

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will; namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” – bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

I’ve always loathed Valentine’s Day. I told myself it was because the holiday was a commercialized and contrived commodification of love for which I was too enlightened to engage. (Insert eye roll emoji).

But, if I take an honest look backward, I think I began hating Valentine’s Day in school, when it became a symbol of how popular, or desirable, a person was perceived to be by their peers. Instead of celebrating love, it felt like we were measuring our lovableness, and a deep dread began to build in anticipation of finding out my worst fears were true – I was not all that lovable, after all.

I suppose this kind of repeated dread would naturally cause an inflammatory response, and that just might be how I came to disdain the day.

I don’t know what it is about this year, but my “two-sizes too-small heart” seems to be opening to this commercialized, commodified, and contrived Day of Love. I’ve been reflecting on what I know of love, and it occurs to me that nothing has challenged me, surprised me, upended me, or formed me more than learning a few love lessons, the first of which is this:

Every time I’ve believed I could not possibly love a person, I’ve been dead wrong.

Or, put another way, my capacity for loving is shockingly, mind-bogglingly, not fixed. Every time I think my capacity for love can’t expand, it somehow does.

The day I held my firstborn in my arms, I realized I had never known true love until I met him. To me, he was the most beautiful, marvelous creation that had ever existed, and he instantly became the center of my universe.

My life for your life, son.

When I found out I was pregnant with my second child, I was overjoyed but also deeply worried that I could never love this one the way I loved my first. I mean, how would it be possible to love two people with an all-encompassing love? Simultaneously loving two souls with my entire being? The math ain’t mathin’.

The miracle is that my heart inexplicably expanded to include them both, of course. When I held my second son for the first time, he took his rightful place, naturally, at the center of my heart.

My life for your life, son.

When we adopted our daughter many years later, love didn’t come as naturally. We were two strangers, she and I. Our path to love would be difficult, scary, and transformational. There were days when I trudged through the motions of motherhood, my heart aching from fear that I could never love her the way I loved my other children. And, even more deeply, I feared she could never love me as her mother.

This is the point in my journey in which I learned another important thing about love. The heart expansion doesn’t always come naturally or automatically. Love doesn’t come to us in only one way, thank God! Through giving our lives for the sake of another, our capacity for love grows. The verb precedes the noun.

My life for your life, daughter.

The sacrifice comes before the miracle, the night before the dawn, the death before the resurrection.

Eventually she became the center of my universe, too. We were grafted together, two unlikely girls with wounded hearts, as mother and child.

Speaking of mothers, I thought I could never fully love my own mom who gave me the wounds that made it difficult to love my daughter. But the wisdom of forgiveness called out to me as the balm my aching soul needed so much. At first, forgiving her felt like a death. Would there be no justice for me? But having learned my own insufficiencies as a mother, a newly found compassion compelled me.

My life for your life, mom.

What opened between my mom and I was that rarest, most desired, experience of all: unconditional love. My capacity grew and soon she was standing, as her true self and not what I wanted or needed her to be for me, at the center of my heart.

I believed I could never love people whose own pain caused them to push me away, reject me, and lash out at me. As my sister was being ravaged to death by cancer, she did all those things. And once she died, her children, in their overwhelming grief, did the same.

I wanted to run away from the rejection, to close in on myself so tightly that I wouldn’t feel the agony anymore. Miserable, angry, and bitter though I was, I stood. I stayed. I refused to be moved.

My life for your life, family.

As a result, my sister passed from this world enveloped in the safety of my love and I in hers. Eventually, her children became my children and her grandson my grandson. As I trusted in the process of heart expansion, I received back more abundance, more blessing, and more love than I could have ever given away. My sister and her children took their places at the center of my heart.

You can’t outgive God, the old saying goes. This, I have found, is plain truth.

Speaking of trusting in the process, I believed I could never love my life partner if he broke my heart. I was married at the ripe age of eighteen and, in my unformed mind, true romantic love meant bliss. I wasn’t prepared for the work, the fights, the forgiveness demanded. I didn’t understand the high cost of faithfulness to another human being. (Spoiler alert: faithfulness costs everything). What I’ve discovered, through staying in the ring, is that love can heal and expand even the most broken heart.

Through my marriage I have learned that love is at its most sublime not when it evokes passion and perfection, but when it is in service to something higher.

Our lives for one another, partner.

Though we continue to rumble, my husband has his very own unique place at the center of my heart.

I believed I could never love anyone who challenged my black-and-white thinking about what is right and wrong. Tolerate them? Sure. Accept them? Sort of. But allow my heart to expand enough to include them unconditionally, when that inclusion would mean surrendering the tidy boxes I’d learned to sort people into for the sake of safety and certainty? That didn’t seem possible.

But heck, love’s stretching power had continually surprised me so many times before, why not see where it could take me this time? As I allowed myself proximity to new people with their own stories, perspectives, and inner light, I found myself disarmed. Or it’s more accurate to say I laid down my defensive weapons meant to maintain boundaries between them and me. It felt vulnerable and risky, but I allowed my capacity to grow.

My life for your life, friends.

Once again, these unlikely friends took their places in my heart, and I discovered another surprising thing about love. By loving these people so unlike myself, I feared I would lose myself. By allowing challenge to my sense of right and wrong, I feared I would lose my way.

But what I found is that the expansion of my heart has only restored me, more and more, to my truest self and to a deeper understanding of what is most right and most wrong in this world.

The biggest surprise of all, however, has been the capacity of my heart to expand enough to include me.

I believed that if I took an unflinching look at myself, conducted a thorough review of my sins and shortcomings, faced up to the pain I’ve caused others, assessed the damage I’ve done, and owned the mistakes I’ve made, that I could never love me. The same school girl who feared the exposure that she was unlovable was still alive and well within me. Therefore, I used every cognitive trick in the book to avoid this work. I used religion, “good” living, superiority, success, and achievement to run from myself but, eventually, I was faced with a choice. I could continue to exile my true self, or I could surrender to God’s real and unconditional love.

It was the choice between life and death, blessing and cursing. What would it be?

God’s life for your life, beloved soul.

And this is the point where I learned another important lesson about love. Love is an intention and love is a choice. Yes, always.

But love is also a surrender. It’s a loss of control. It’s a blind dive into the deep end. It’s being born again. It’s becoming like a child. It’s being embarrassed by receiving riches you did not earn. It’s uncomfortable moments of nakedness, while waiting and trusting to be clothed in garments which fit you perfectly but are not your own.

Love is a glorious shitshow of standing and falling and fighting and failing and staying when you want to run away. It’s feeling for the Divine Hand next to you, always reaching out to hold you as you scream and jump into the deep end again and again.

So, Happy Freaking Valentine’s Day, dear reader! May you reject the belief that you could never love. May you bravely surrender to the expansion of your heart and see where love takes you.

“Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself as humble as dust and ashes.” – Rumi