Time for a celebration of love - a little attention to love and its power.
There is so much push toward fear all around. Also anger, frustration, loneliness, misery. Social distancing, economic hardship, sudden adult death syndrome, looming food shortages.
If fear is what "they" want - fear, frustration, loneliness, sickness, hunger, so many forms of misery - it's all the more important that we go toward what gives us life, and one of those things is love.
So I’ve done what I intended as a short celebration of love. But much of the video is a looking back at how loving was broken in my mother’s family. I’m anything but an expert on love.
The first thought that came to mind: my mother’s mother is seven months old and her mother has just died. I wonder, was she in the room? I imagine her on the bed with her mother.
In her first months, her mother was dying of tuberculosis. She had been warned not to marry, as she had a bit of tuberculosis. Pregnancy and childbirth would likely kill her. But she fell in love, and the young man, a pharmacist, assured her he knew how to prevent pregnancy. That’s not what happened.
What was that pregnancy like? And the childbirth? Childbirth - not easy even for a healthy woman.
And then the months after? Did she love the baby? Did she still love her husband? And what about her husband?
Did she believe, at the start, that she would get better? Did she know she was dying? What was it like for her, knowing she was leaving her baby without a mother?
After her death and for the next seven years, the baby who would become my grandmother experienced a lot of neglect.
How do I know? When she was seven, an aunt came to visit. The aunt saw pus running out of both of the little girl’s ears. She said to the father: I’m taking her home with me. And she did.
But it was not easy. No happily ever after.
A long story. A long legacy.
My mother was a care-taker. But she said many many times in the last years of her life, that she didn’t know how to love.
There is so much more to that legacy - like what happened to my mother when she was eleven.
Hard - impossible even - to just walk away from one’s heritage. One can desire to feel warm and loving feelings. They don’t come out on command.
The legacy from my father’s side of the family is different, but no better. His mother had parents who loved each other deeply. Her father would carry her mother to the barn to milk the goats.
Their daughter’s life - my grandmother’s life - was utterly different. After she became pregnant, unmarried, she decided she did not want to marry the man she was seeing. She had seen his cruelty, not yet to her but to some poor old man. But her happily married mother did not want the shame of having a daughter who was an unwed mother. My grandfather beat her and the children. He also drank. The marriage lasted 42 years, until his death.
About a year after his death, my grandmother told me, just once, what could have been her life, if her mother had not pushed her to marry my grandfather. There was a good man who, she knew, was in love with her and would marry her. This man ended up marrying a woman who had 2 children outside marriage and he treated her like a queen all her life.
That could have been my grandmother’s life. So near.
There was a warmth, a lovingness to my grandmother, perhaps coming from a childhood with parents who loved each other and their children.
On the other hand, her loving mother did not love her daughter enough to put her daughter’s well-being above her sense of shame.
What a mixture of love, shame more powerful than love, perhaps guilt when she saw her daughter’s life - and a society which did not help my grandmother or her children.
What to do with that?
I don’t want to be caught, stuck in looking back. I also know the past cannot be ignored.
My choice?
Time for the start of an ongoing celebration of love.
Before before that, what about you? When do you feel most loving? Is it during a time of silence with someone you love - partner, infant, pet? Is it remembering moments of loving? Is it when you see someone you love? Is it during “slow times” - walking in nature, for instance? Is it when you and someone you love look into each other’s eyes?
What memories come to mind when you think back to moments of strong loving feeling?
Are there many memories, too many to count?
Are there only a few?
Are there none?
And now, the beginning of a celebration of love:
https://rumble.com/v19s2gr-a-celebration-of-love.html
Posted August 11, 2022
Love one of the misused words in our language, the word covers everything from ice cream to deep bonding of life's partners, I like to give the biblical classification where at least four (4) different words used describing love 1. motherly / fatherly love for her children, 2. Brotherly love between persons, 3 the emotional / erotic between lovers, 4 . God's love Hessed /agape conventical . All there place in our relationships and life.
Thank you, great blog. agree totally with you the missing ingredient in all of life's journeys is Love. Love conquers all.