Letters to my daughters (September): LOVE

Photo: Ekaterina Shakharova

My darling girls

I love you.

It’s easy to say. And it doesn’t take much to say it. And you hear it. Sometimes you respond. Sometimes you crack on with whatever you’re up to. It’s not a game we play; I don’t say it to hear it back. I just love you. It is now who I am.

But I want you to know it too.

And every now and then you voluntarily say it to me. There’s feeling in how you say it. And sometimes there’s no ulterior motive! No biscuit to barter. It just is. Our love, elastic as it can feel with the pushes and pulls of life between us, is real, and alive and active. And it fills me up.

But I want you to know that our love doesn’t always look or feel easy. Sometimes I demonstrate my love to you in ways that annoy you, frustrate you, make you want to pull away. My love comes in a range of packages – but it all comes from the same root.

My love for you is not for my benefit – although it really does make me feel great. My love is my gift to you. It is a message about how very loveable you are. It is a message that you are precious and worth looking after. It is complex and complicated – and sometimes brilliantly simple – just as are all the people and the relationships that you will experience ahead.

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (the architects of my favourite* psychological idea, Attachment Theory) describe how my love will provide you with a template to be able to love others – and yourself. It will provide you with the platform from which to know, and to feel what it is like, to know your true value and to be treated well by others.

My love will give you the tools to love and respect yourself and to know when others are not reaching the mark. Hopefully, it will help you avoid idiot lovers, a manipulative friend, or a bully of a boss. I want you to know what it feels like to be valued completely; others will need to meet that standard, and find you where you are.

Having said that, I will also ask things of you that are infuriating. I will ask you to brush your teeth every day. (Yes, twice.) Because I love and care for those little teeth. Yes, I will ask you to move your cereal bowl to the sink after breakfast because I want to you learn how to love our shared space. And yes, sometimes I will leave you with other people, so that you can feel your own thoughts and have a chance to learn about and love yourself in other people’s company.

These are all forms of my love.  

And what about the love that hurts a bit?

Not all love is soft and fluffy, after all. The love that causes grief when someone dies, for instance. It is sheer pain; nothing less. Then there’s that spikey, confusing, sharp kind of love that can make us feel jealousy or disappointment – the other side of the love coin.

Love for other people has often been the reason for the biggest emotions in my life (both high and low). I’ve not always made good choices, not always aware that I had a choice. But I hope you’ll know how to navigate your own love landscape with more confidence, as long as you know yourself and understand what it is you need.

I think that’s what my love is here to help with, as you get going through that terrain. My love is without conditions, hopefully forgiving, and the receptacle in which you can explore what you need – knocking against the edges as you test it, as you test me. With my parents, I wasn’t always sure where the edges were, and its taken a while to work that out. 

And what about the love for something instead of someone? In my experience, loving any thing too much can be slippery slope – our attachment to things or activities even edging into degrees of obsession or addiction. I am having to learn to let go of things belonging to Granny Bel as we just don’t have room for them in our home. They are just things, afterall. One of the things I love about your Dad is his gentle reminder that we have all we really need in each other. Everything else is a bonus.

Grandpa Thomas gave me a book recently called ‘The 5 Love Languages’. The book is about different ways that we need to both receive and express love to and from other people. I haven’t opened it yet as I felt that from him, it was pure hypocrisy to try and teach me a thing or two about love! He never worked out how to love his children well, I’m afraid. So now I even resent the book.

But I expect there is something in that book (annoyingly) because it requires us to know ourselves. It also helps us recognise what we offer others and that we all have different sorts of relational needs. Relationships will be positive, on more occasions that not, if we know who we are, what we offer and what we need from them in return.

It requires self-knowing, not self-doubt. It requires self-love, not just the love of others. It requires an awareness, a noticing when something doesn’t feel right – and the confidence to move away or find something better if not.

Also, my darlings, I say this as a people pleaser (in recovery). I say it as someone who has previously longed for the love of others before committing to loving myself well. I say it as someone who has, at times, divorced myself from the very lovable person I am. I’m not for everyone. But that doesn’t matter. No one is. 

For you to be able to move around the world with faith in your lovable self, is, I think, my most important role as your parent. I have sometimes felt that my love for you both will squash me with the enormity of it – air-knocked-out-of-lungs territory. Equally, I have felt blasé, confident it is just there. It just is.

But you feeling my love is the main thing. You knowing that regardless of what you experience, my love will help you to love yourself and others well, is the key. Hopefully my input won’t knock the air out of your lungs along the way.

Rather, inflate them.

I love you. There, I said it again.

Your loving Mama x

*Yes, I am old and sad and have a favourite psychological theory. But really, this one’s a corker – and if you want to know more, here’s a 7 minute video about it x