When love shows up it overwhelms everything. It is a feeling that inspires and compels you. This love is an animating force that propels you, like a stitch in time, forward. Before you know it you awake somewhere new. Somewhere you never knew you were going despite being present at every turn, nominally at the wheel but largely along for the ride that Love takes you on.
It can be disorienting and for moments it can even leave you feeling disconcerted. I felt that way at times. Felt like I’d been taken for a ride and dropped off somewhere where I didn’t know anyone, especially me. At first it’s so filled with passion, so unavoidably overflowing with pleasurable experiences. Laughter can start to feel the norm. Warm comforts come to be expected and endless days of countless indulgences start to feel like a promise. One that you think is being made to you by the other person in the room. You make those promises in return because who are you to stop the train.
Before long the obligations come. The money. The time and effort. The constant availability and eager setting aside of preference in order to please the other. It can start to weigh on you, but neither of you are ready to stop. You feel like if you do, if you change priorities, introduce self care and individual preferences and dreams and goals you are failing each other. Or worse, you are failing at love. But you aren’t. Not at all. Not by a long shot. You are incorporating yourself into the equation, the parts that love didn’t render meaningless. Perhaps the parts that love will in fact enable, nurture, even treasure so long as you can reclaim them.
Then the kids arrive and my understanding of love was both refined and expanded. I learned a kind of love that exists in my soul. An immutable version that will never, can never die. A version that commands my presence and I delight in giving it endlessly. It demands my efforts and I give them unquestioningly. It taught me that the only way to sustain feelings was through doing. Love is a verb. it’s true. At times I can choose without even knowing, to stop making the effort it requires of me and when I do I thank my lucky stars that my wife has the patience to wait for me, the committment to look for me and the willingness to love me when I don’t deserve it. It sounds worse than it is. It’s just a distance or a pointed aloofness in our interactions, but I assure you it’s not pleasant.
Then, for no reason I can think of, I see it. I see that I’m failing love and failing her and failing me and it passes. I commit to being present. I commit to loving actively and our love picks up where we left off. Sometimes it’s her. Sometimes its me. Often its both. Whatever, it’s us. We’re in it together and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
developing dad 