Child Love, Grownup Love, and Love In The Multiverse

Child Love

As a child, love is rocking to sleep after hearing your favorite story one-more-time. You don’t realize it at the time, but love is breakfast of arranged smiley-faced foods that aren’t icky, or touching one another. It’s staying up late to watch fireflies when they’re most abundant. It’s a warm body next to you, gently tickling your neck after a bad dream. A safe place to rest after a sweaty day exploring.

Grownup Love

Love as an adult is those things, too, but somewhere, somehow, it gets more complicated. As a young adult, it’s friends and laughter, and trying on new people to see how they lift you or drain you. It’s moments so wonderful and amazing that they serve as inspiration and confirmation of where you belong.

Parental Love

As a parent, love is watching the person you’re lucky enough to witness find himself become more of who he’s always been. It’s laced with worry and fear, and oh, so much pride. Love is sitting on the sofa wearing a pirate hat because sometimes, that’s even better than smiling breakfast foods that aren’t icky, or touching. Maybe, for some, it’s sharing your story, and finding your people.

Love In The Multiverse

As a parent to a kiddo who sometimes struggles harder than his peers, love is growing to see the beauty in differing abilities. I mean, you mostly saw the beauty in that before, but when your own kid struggles, you learn to embrace all people’s struggles. You grow bigger and wiser. Dream of a land of empathy and wonder. 

Looking through photos from when you were on top of the world, and laughing together about the look on your kid’s face over an anatomically correct statue and his balls. Knowing you’ll remember for years.

It’s sitting at parkour camp. Noticing a little boy who reminds you of your son. He’s got long, messy hair, and is bouncier than most of the kids. It’s seeing him nail front-flips over and over, never seeming to tire, and realizing that he, and all kids – all humans – are multiverse versions of one another. Some struggle with speech. Some, with social interactions. Some with doing a single front flip. Love becomes seeing your kid being helped by an instructor to do a less-complicated flip, and not doing it very gracefully.

Gratitude for the instructor is love, and it’s your not-so-little-little boy running up to you, red-faced and sweaty. Bouncing. “Did you see me Mom? Did you see my flips?”

“I did,”I say, and he runs back to the group. Sometimes, love is not wondering why some people are so much more athletic than others and seeing the pride of a flip-like maneuver at parkour camp.

Love becomes not wondering whether you should’ve started gymnastics or parkour earlier. He’s in it now, and he’s proud. He’ll remember this, and so will you. 

Hearing “Mom, take a picture of how flexible I am,” and knowing you’ll remember the request for years and years, and that newer, bigger requests will come, and you’ll love each version of himself, here and in the multiverse. As he grows and becomes, so will you. That’s the best love of all.

*** This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post, with the prompt “Love…”