an imperfect love

Her Bad Mother has written a beautiful post about the love between a parent and child. Go read it. It's that good.

***

The musings over there got me thinking. I understand that physical love she talks about. I like to think that every parent understands it, even though I know that's not the case. As evidenced by the dialogue spewing from the yard behind mine at this very moment -- but that is another post altogether. (Maybe I'm being a tad judgmental, but I strongly suspect that if you can scream at your two-year-old to "shut the f*** up" on a daily basis, you just don't love him the right way. Argue with me all the you want.)

Ghoulie's smile warms my heart. And when she is away from me, I yearn for her. I crave her. It's almost as if I am missing a physical part of myself. When she is with me, I feel whole.

But there another side to this physical love, a darker side, of which I am more keenly aware. And that is the deep, cold dread that I feel at the thought of something bad happening to her.

I have been afraid for people before. I have a strong tendency to worry unnecessarily. (My parents used to call me "Kevin," after the high-anxiety kid from Parenthood.) If Jake is five minutes late coming home, I'm convinced he's had an accident. And if he doesn't answer his phone, I start planning his funeral. I do the same thing with my family, my close friends, generally anyone I care about. But there is a significant difference between the worrying I do over others and the fear that I feel where Ghoulie is concerned, namely, anyone else must first give me cause to worry. They must be late or unreachable or otherwise not where they belong at a given time. As long as the people I love are where I expect them to be, I'm worry-free.

Not so with Ghoulie.

Ghoulie can be sitting beside me, or even in my arms, when suddenly I am struck by the thought of something terrible happening to her. Illness, SIDS, accidents too awful for me to write about. Or worse, non-accidents perpetrated by terrorists or others. I daydream the stuff of nightmares. And when I do, my heart pounds, my breath quickens, I sweat. For a moment, I panic, until I can hold Ghoulie tightly in my arms and cry over her innocence and her beauty. Never in my life have I felt love, nor fear, quite like this.

And that leads me to a deeper, theological question. The love I feel for my child is the strongest, purest love I have ever felt. It is the closest thing I can imagine to "perfect" love. (I love Jake dearly. I am still, after four years of marriage, infatuated with him. But I am not convinced that love between two adults can ever be as pure and selfless as the love of a parent for a child. I hope he would agree.) Yet in the Bible, the apostle John says, "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear. . ." (John 4:18a) So if I feel such dread over something happening to Ghoulie, does that mean I don't love her enough? That I love her imperfectly?

There are a few possible answers, or at least two. The first is related to the second half of that same Bible verse: ". . .because fear has to do with punishment." Maybe I am afraid that I don't deserve Ghoulie. Correction: I know I don't deserve her. Perhaps I am afraid that cosmic forces will punish me by taking her away. Or maybe I see that so much of the world is imperfect (to say the least), and I recognize that not everyone loves my daughter as deeply as I do. That some people in this world, hard as it is to imagine, do not love her at all. That particular thought is too baffling and distressing for me to dwell on at the moment.

But I think the real answer is this: That no human being can ever love another perfectly. Maybe the love I feel for my child is the closest I'll ever come, and it's just a small taste of what perfect love is. Maybe in another life, I'll have a much better understanding of it.

That leads me to a series of even more baffling thoughts. First, that I have been loved in this way by my own parents. And second, that Someone Else loves me even more than they do, loves me, in fact, perfectly.

Christianity says that parents are supposed to demonstrate unconditional love so that their children will have an understanding of God. But for me, it's being a parent, even more than being a child, that has made my understanding clear. (Or at least, clearer.) You can know someone loves you all you want. It's only when you love someone else that way, that love begins to make sense.