LOVE IS???

Love Is….How many of you recognize that familiar cartoon? I remember them from the Sunday newspaper when I was a child and like so many other girls my age, I cut them out each week and saved them in a binder. I drew them all over every school note-book I owned and plastered the posters up on my bedroom walls. I don’t know why, but I think it might have been that they spoke to the innocence of the times and the childish notions of what Love really is.

Just recently because of some personal events in my life I found myself pondering that age-old question again, about what Love Is. It is the one thing we all as human beings desire yet most of us really have no clue what we are looking for so we will let others try to define it for us.

Our first introduction to “love” comes from our mothers. For many of us it comes in the form of felling safe. We equate the fact that she fills all our needs with “loving” us, but is that really love? It would depend on her own belief in what Love Is. For some mothers its nothing more than a feeling of responsibility that drives her to care for her child, so is that love?

For many of us our next introduction to love come from our fathers in the form of feeling protected. As a little girl I always thought my father was a giant of a man. Not physically but he was this person who made me feel pretty even when the boys were telling me I had “cooties”. For little boys I imagine it must be a feeling of strength and power, but again is that really love? Again it would depend on his own belief in what Love Is. For some fathers it’s nothing more than a feeling of expectation that drives him to care for his child, so is that love?

 

So our beginning building block for understanding love are responsibility and expectation and it’s those things we take with us as we grow that we will apply to all the other encounters we have as we seek love. We learn to love a pet, love a best friend, love a sibling, and we begin to understand the depth of love in our lives. But each of these also introduces us to a different view of what Love Is. We love our pet because we care for all its needs and that makes us smile, or fills a void. We love a best friend so that we are not lonely, or we can feel accepted. We love our siblings because we are taught they are “family” and it’s what families do. But are any of these emotions really love or are we really just filling personal needs?

By the time we reach that age when the opposite sex hits our radar most of us have experienced what we believe is love in many different ways, but it isn’t until then that we actually start to examine what “love” is to us. Depending on the experiences we have had up to that point, defining love is as different for each of us now as the blades of grass in your front lawn, yet now society steps in and hands us a “check list” of expectation that tells us what love should be and trying to justify our own beliefs with that check list can be a difficult task.

When that special someone enters our lives it is like the clash of the titans when it comes to love. Each of us is bringing predefined notions and trying to find that middle ground. More times than not it doesn’t work simply because we really are not willing to compromise or accept their ideas of what Love Is because to do so means we have to risk our own ideas. So we end up lying to ourselves and others just so we can say we are in love.

Then by some magical force of nature we find that one person we think we love and we build a life with them. Blending our notions and beliefs with theirs until we both find common ground. but have we really found “love” or have we just learned to compromise much the way our own parents did.

Our final introduction to love is that feeling we have when we decide to have children. For most of us whether it is a planned event or one that takes us by surprise we as mothers all find ourselves at that moment when we see that child for the first time and we are overwhelmed with a jumble of emotions. Anger, pain, fear, joy, relief, protectiveness, confusion, trepidation, success, desire, obligation, responsibility and laughter all at war with one another in the blink of an eye, yet “love” is none of these so how do we equate it as all of these at once?

Love is….the most confusing and elusive emotion a human can feel, yet it is the one we want most and the one that is easiest to convince ourselves to feel.

For me personally, I have given up the hunt for love because for me Love Is…unjustifiable, undependable, unpredictable and undefinable but it is the one thing that I never say without meaning it with all my heart. To do any less than that would be dishonest so I take it one day at a time.

Copyright © 2010 TAllen60

 All rights reserved

 

Thanks to the Artist Bill Asprey and Creator Kim Casali

 for the many great years of the cartoon Love Is…

Today’s Youth

  Would someone please explain to me what the hell has happened to todays youth? I was raised in a traditional home where you respected your parents NOT because they respected you but because you understood just how much they sacrificed so you could have a good life and for how hard they worked. There was something about them having lived long lives and surviving experiences you as a kid could only speculate about.

   Today, this isn’t the case. Kids seem to think that just their existence on this planet warrants them the respect of their elders. They don’t want to have to work for it and they don’t feel like they have to earn it. This applies to their parents and other adults as well. Somewhere along the line someone told them they are entitled and they believe it.

   Maybe this is why we have so many kids with no ambition, direction or motivation to be decent human beings who don’t just “take” from everyone and feel no need to give back? That is a sad thought because it tells me that it was the parents of these kids that created this “utopian view” of the world and in doing so have seriously short-changed their children.  So many are more interested in being friends with the kids than being a parent and they fail to see that it is “parents” that kids NEED not friends.

   Just recently I had a personal experience where I was told by one of my own kid’s friends that I was “selfishly mean” and that I on a daily basis told my child for her entire life that “she was not as good as” any of her sisters. Both of which are bold-faced lies as I have always defended my daughter and always will. Yet this 19-year-old who has never done a thing for herself then went on to reprimand me for not being a “good mother”. This is a kid who is a 19-year-old drop out and does nothing but live off others. From her parents to any guy who will support her desire to sleep all day, party, drink, do drugs and run the road. I met her when she was a 14-year-old “mall rat” who was out all hours of the night and in the 5 years since I have not seen her change at all, just get better at using people. Because she is my daughters friend however, I have made many attempts to just accept the fact that she is a product of the parents she had who were those “friends” I spoke of and I have even found myself defending her on more than one occasion. Now that may seem strange to some of you but I used to think I saw the “possibilities” in this kid. Sadly I don’t see them anymore. I am afraid she is going to end up one more statistic, because that is all she wants to be. My problem is, is that she is determined to bring my daughter down with her and I refuse to let that happen. She has gone so far as to threaten me that if I don’t watch out she will make sure that my daughter moves out and moves in with her and her boyfriend whom she tells everyone is her husband. When I called her on her obnoxious behavior I got the typical response of “fuck you” grow up! If that hadn’t made me laugh so hard I might have been more angry. But as she said I am a REALLY OLD MATURE woman so I just considered the source, something my years of life experience have taught me how to do.

   As sad as I find the above tale, I must take some responsibility as well for the reaction of my own kids who were witness to this. I admit I found my feelings pretty hurt at the moment when they didn’t defend me in this confrontation. Instead they glossed over it and honestly that left me feeling pretty deserted. Maybe it’s because I can’t ever think of a time when if someone had spoken to my mother like this I would not have jumped down their throat, whether they were a friend or not. That is my “mother” and I would have defended her because I owed that to her out of respect for all she had done for me in my lifetime. My kids didn’t get that belief I guess, even though I tried to instill it in each of them.

   So after a night of deep thought I have to wonder what it is that I missed or what it is that I did wrong? I wonder why I am not entitled to the respect I deserve and why I find myself having to defend against kids with no understanding of what being a parent really is? I never saw this coming and maybe I should have. That is on me I guess.

  I just wish that parents would step up to the plate again and start being parents. If they don’t we will have no one to blame for the generations to come but ourselves, and trust me if this is any indication of what kind of people they will be…I am glad I won’t be around to see the fall out.

  Bottom line is this…when you at 19 have done something with your life besides take from others, then and only then will you get my respect. I have in 50 years earned my respect and your responsible for doing the same. That’s life…grow up and deal with it.  I am an old school mom and I don’t have to defend that!