My Love, You Are Right
My love, you are right about things.
You're right about the way things should be, the way people should love each other.
With the right people, you can live like they ARE that way.
Like the truth is neutral and desirable.
Like the things that interest and excite you are important and relevant and well-received.
Like we hang out to have a good time together.
But all your life, out of the blue, your constants have shifted.
This alone is enough to make you blame yourself. To attempt whatever contortion the world might ask to put things right again.
The only sanity is in the idea that you might be the problem, because at least you have control of you.
Then there is the way they told you it was about you.
The way they couldn't face their own grief.
The way they lashed out at you when all the things it really was were too many to count, and you were nearby, oblivious to the pressures. Annoying in developmentally appropriate ways.
Some part of your most urgent attention is always attuned to the ways in which you might be a problem, the way you might solve for it ahead of time, avoid a consequence which is actually a happenstance, a powderkeg waiting on a spark.
Some part of mine used to be, too.
Here in my town I watch children raised with respect, and I could wallow in grief forever, the child in me, what I expected and did not receive, or I can learn to receive that respect.
I can go on a walk with my family, and let everyone know I'm only 5 years old that day, and I receive reparenting, even more than I have done for myself. Not as a burden, as a game!
As a gift, to them as much as me.
They get to parent me. They get to love me, and that's the enthusiasm they bring.
We all bring it, to each other.
Once upon a time I wondered, what would it be like if we greeted other adults the way we will greet a random baby or child on the street? With eye contact and a big smile, an open heart, HELLO, MY DARLING, LOOK AT YOU! You are wonderful, welcome to the world.
Now I don't wonder, I feel the deliciousness of a community oriented to loving each other.
With this tendency humans have, to marvel at small things, at pure potential, we all get a taste of what it can be like. We have all been babies in public. We get to know what it is to be held in awe and esteem. To be praised for existing, to be admired in our beingness, even as we scream and cry.
We get it early, it is in our cellular memory, part of our most formative experiences. Growing up can sadly be a process of losing it altogether.
We get it from strangers, and sadly it can feel scarce in our own homes. When it comes from strangers but not from your closest caregivers, how can you help but draw the conclusion that anyone who *really* gets to know you might discover you're unlovable?
It is not your business if people in your past who had the rare privilege to love you squandered it in their practice of resenting maintenance and responsibility.
It is not your business that they were too overwhelmed to love you, it is not your business why.
It is your business to find the ones who know the privilege it is to love you and embrace it as yet another sacred privilege of responsibility they get to enjoy.
It is your business to believe in those who maintain through pleasure and play and can't imagine making anything a chore, but especially not you.
It is a pleasure to delight in how you are.
It is a pleasure to love you.
Imagine never second-guessing that. Imagine a community that reminds you all the time.