Love Actually

This contains some details which may be upsetting to those who have experienced the pain of sexual abuse.

I hadn’t a file folder for love so I had to create one from the parchment paper of pain. Little scraps of the architecture of affection came by way by sitcoms, fairytales, and fiction. I ate the crumbs of others peoples love, literally (on at least one occasion) like the dog under the masters table.

Love was never for me personally, so I secretly scanned for scraps and treasures from run over love of others. It worked for a long time — it had to as there were no other viable alternatives. Real friends were hard to come by when your father fancies them, when you fit in exactly no where, where the boys don’t notice you because you are made to look like them, and don’t even get me started with the girls. There is a reason why the term “mean girls” has such resonance.

Sex wasn’t love but it was touch. The unloved don’t get touched much. That door was broken down before the wall had even been put up. So much for purity or innocence, both were bastardized before they breathed.

I loved others, madly, but I couldn’t see for the life of me, why others would love me. When I first met my now husband, B, one of the first things I thought was, “What is a guy like you doing with a gal like me.” It is not that I believed then or now, that I was inherently evil, or bad. I had long since concluded that I was useful to have around but if love was a verb then I was never, not ever, actually loved.

To love is a trillion little things. As a child it is to be held, fed, clothed, cleaned and cuddled. My skull has a permanent dent in it from neglect. It is to be cared for when you are sick. The first time I recollect someone holding me was when I sick was my step mother’s aunt — I was twelve. I was feverish that I felt suffocated and sweaty — not held. Parental love is supposed to protect, provide, and pastor — I had to protect myself from my parents and figure out how to get by with nothing. Love was never in the air unless you count the times he proclaimed it as he pressed into me.

Most people have a past that anchors them. I have a past that has left me without mooring. For me that means no “remember when?” with longterm chums, no decades old neighbours, and not a single member of my own ancestry. It means separated siblings, no older women to teach the younger, and no mature men to call upon in crisis. I have tried to love other peoples parents, God only knowns how hard. I would have been SUCH a good daughter. I am dead tired and done trying.

I thought I would live an unloved life not because I was inherently unloveable, but that it probably wouldn’t be possible for me to be loved actually. The life that I had been born into had been too hard, the losses too early, too painful, and too profound.

The eyes are windows that I watched closely. I knew well the look of disgust. I had hatred down pat. I was keenly aware of apathy and locked up at the look of lust. Actual love also has a look.

Until I had my first child I had never personally experienced the look of actual love and the first was when mine met hers. Trauma is intergenerational and it has been costly for her and all of my children to have me as a mother. Yet, for the most part, they live like the loved ones that they are. They sing too loud in too long showers, dance around the cluttered kitchen, and muck up to the table in a seat that they know is secure. The Lord sets the lonely in families and I know that my children need me, but make no mistake, I need them — viscerally. They, and precious few others, are my only family.

Until I met B, I do not recall ever having been the object of another’s consuming cocktail of appraisal, approval, affection, and adoration. Each time I catch that look in his eye feel my damaged DNA change, my demeanour relax, and sometimes I even dance a little with the liberty that comes from one who is deeply loved. B and my wee family (one white puppy included) have been to me a love that has worked backwards with dissevering power to make the wrong sum of my life right (CS Lewis). This is love, actually.

Perhaps, like me, you think that love is not actually you, that you had it but lost it, or never found it in the first place, and fear you never will. Find something on four feet to love and to love you back. Love on two feet can have unlimited complications but “to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” (The Four Loves CS Lewis)

As we celebrate love in its many forms, remember that love is the single most powerful force in the universe. Some people think it is hate. It is not. Only love can work backwards into a painful past, make the present a more spacious place, and the future less fearful.

Despite all signs that may have converged to the contrary, you are loved. Actually.