The Makings of Love
Dear one,
There are so many things I wish we women were told going into motherhood. I wish we were told that how often we touch and hold our babies in their first three years after birth literally shapes their biology on a cellular level for the rest of their lives. I wish we were told that it is normal to experience a vast range of emotions, intense and volatile, around bringing a child through our bodies and into the world. I wish we were told the teen years will ask us to step into greater capacity for compassion and connection than the toddler years ever require. That the story wrapped around mothering being a struggle is just that: a story, and that we can write a different story around how we experience each season that unfolds in our children lives.
Some of things I wish we were told are so simple they slip through the cracks and never seem to merit mention. Things like the impact of body language, and the way words really mean so little compared to the language of the body. Things like eye contact, a hand on the shoulder, smiling when your child looks towards you. Tiny things, tiny building blocks that forge a sense of reassurance and safety that lasts well into adulthood.
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
The art of loving well gets a fair amount of attention, but mostly in terms of relationships negotiated between adults. We all know we have to invest consciously in friendships, in romantic partnerships, in marriage, and even in coworker relationships. But with our children? How often do we take the time to consider—truly consider—exactly what it is we can practice on a daily basis to bathe them in a sense of security? of value? of love?
Entering into mothering, I knew developing at least one clear intention around how I would parent was not a luxurious pastime but a necessity. As pregnancy unfolded with my son, I began to call to mind my childhood experience of my beloved mother, my first teacher in all things love. As a child I was strong willed, tempestuous, and loud in my emotions. We didn’t have a secure home life. She had minimal to no support in so many, if not all, areas. I wasn’t an easy child for her to parent.
And yet.
Over and over again, in thinking of what I wanted to carry into my own mothering, I kept coming back to a particular re-occurring memory:
My mother, as I entered a room, looking up and acknowledging me with her eyes full of LIGHT.
No matter what unfolded or what instability threw my childhood world into a new iteration of chaos, I never needed to ask if I was loved, not by her. I knew. I felt it.
Her gaze told me.
Because mother-child connections often happen organically, simply by nature of our sharing a body for roughly the span of nine months and then functioning as a unit for years afterward, I wonder if we often forget to give our attention to the art of connecting with our little ones.
How many of us have heard that how we look at our children matters?
I knew when I birthed my babe that I wanted to cultivate a practice of looking at him with adoration. I knew I wanted him to see in my face daily—without anything to ever cast a shadow of doubt over his knowing—that to be in his presence is my joy. I wanted him to know that I delight in him.
I think we forget at times that there are a thousand tiny ways to both make and unmake the love with which we surround our children. I think we forget at times, in our eagerness to get on with the doing of life that we are ceaselessly communicating to them in a language without words. And this communication unfolds even (perhaps especially) in the years where they finally develop a stronghold grasp on articulated language.
The way you turned towards your pre-teen, stilled your hands, and smiled to acknowledge her when she walked into the room? You spoke to her.
The way you dropped into a squat to be eye level with your four-year-old when you paused in the middle of dishes and asked him if he wanted to have a quick snuggle? You spoke to him.
The way you glanced up, then reached over and rubbed your palm, steady and slow, across the small of your nine-year-old’s back when she sat down near you on the sofa, each of you absorbed in your own task of the moment? Well, you spoke there too.
There’s a quote I read once, one that has long since slipped my mind, but the essence stayed.
Attention is the oldest and the rarest form of currency among humans.
It’s easy to fall into a sort of haze in which we cheapen the power of our own gaze. In which we think, well, if I did a better job with presents here or chose more profound words there or managed to fit one more playdate into my stuffed-full schedule, perhaps I’d be a better mom. (Or, for that matter, a better friend.) But how often is it we actually miss noticing the very thing our little ones so desperately want from us: our EYES?
It starts so early, that urge to claim attention. First it’s a whimper, a plea to be held close. Then words come, and with it a dozen urgent requests:
“Mom, watch me play!”
“Mom, come look!”
“Mom, see my trick?”
“Mom, look what I drew.”
Mom. Mom. Mom.
Mom.
See me.
What happens, I wonder, if we forget to cultivate giving our little ones the rarest and oldest gift of our eyes, turned towards them? What happens if we forget that as we turn towards them our most miniscule, fleeting expression is tracked by their wide-open hearts, recorded within their being? They know when we look at them whether or not we truly want to see them. They know, intuitively, whether we delight in seeing them.
We’re so good at spinning through life balancing a thousand distractions, never giving more than a fragment of our attention to any one thing. But our little ones…are we giving them fragments? Do they get a place in our line-up of Things to Do and Places to Be? Or do they get to witness, over and over again, every time their eyes meet ours, that they are cherished?
Jeanette Winterson writes beautifully of this in her novel Written on the Body. It isn’t a book about mothering at all, but a tale of an illicit love affair. Still, her words in this passage, building on the words attributed to King Solomon in the Biblical Song of Songs, apply to all loves, and perhaps to none more than the love in which a child is contained by his mother.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. [...] To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.
There are moments, standing at the kitchen counter trying to filter through three chattering conversations at once or rushing through bedtime routines because I am SO tired, when I stop and repeat to myself those haunting words: What then kills love?
At times I blow it; I rush past the nudge. Other times are better. In those brighter times, I hear the call to pause and I take a breath. Open my eyes. Slow down. Look, truly look, at the child in front of me.
I see you. I love looking at you. I love being with you.
We don’t really have all that much time.
You are light embodied.
I adore you.
Slowly, the rush slips away. Slowly, I sink into the present moment, my gaze and my heart tuning into the human in front of me. The shift is always palpable. The warmth blooming between us is felt.
And once again, love is tended, remade (like bread, made new).
Warmly,
Jan
