What is love anyway?
I know all about the warm, fuzzy, I-can’t-wait-until-I-see-them-again feeling. I can’t stop thinking about them and when I see them I wonder if my pacemaker skipped a beat. That is the kind of love is like the fire on a flambé, bright and captivating, then gone. It’s what is left behind after the dessert fire goes out that begins to approach love.
Our childhood shapes how we understand love.
Our childhood shapes how we understand love. Our first love is the love of our parents. So, what happens when you have parents who don’t know much about love, who live out their own pain, fear and trauma, through their children? A child’s love becomes warped.
I was born in St Louis, Missouri on January 30, 1957, my parents first child. I arrived a couple of weeks ahead of time, 4 pounds 3 ounces and was placed in an incubator for 2 weeks. The first time my mother held me was when she brought me home. She was a nervous mother, carrying the normal fears and uncertainties of all new parents multiplied by insecurity and low self-esteem, nurtured and cultivated by an insecure child/man who salved his own fears and low self-esteem by always being right and at the center of the family. I came into the world, like all children, completely dependent upon my caretakers for all needs of life. My mother decided I did not like to be held and as she was not particularly good at nurturing, became even more nervous. I was the first child and like my father the only male child in our family. My grandfather often reminded me; “You are the only Davis grandson I have.” I was tasked with carrying on the family name. After a near death experience as a two-year-old another message was added; “God had something special planned for me,” carrying the weight of family expectations and mythology. In case I forgot of my miraculous recovery and “God’s special plans” the story was recounted by extended family throughout my life.
Love was a thing you earned by being good.
As an infant I knew my mother’s fear and my father’s impatience. They believed children were always trying to get away with something which should be guarded against. I was watched for signs of deception, defiance and rebellion. As a toddler I continued to learn these things punctuated with swats on the rump and spankings. I learned what it meant to be naughty and a “bad boy.” Love was a thing you earned by being good.
Between toddler-hood and my 6th year of life I picked up two sisters, each of us two years apart, decided I would never be bad enough to be spanked again and left behind in the deepest recess of memory sexual abuse by my father. I learned that I was in competition with him, a threat to his own self-worth and I suspect, one of the most recent sexual abuse survivors in my family going back many generations. The memories, like toxic waste stored in a leaking time capsule, remained mostly unavailable to me for over 50 years, even while their contents dribbled poisons into the aquifer of my psyche.
What happens when our first love is based on fear?
What happens to love when your first love, the foundation of love, is based on fear, pain, and sorrow? This becomes what you build upon, looking for love to meet the need we all share: to be loved, to be valued, to be worthwhile, to be safe. When we bring all those unmet needs into adulthood love gets interpreted and shaped by them.
For me this led to deep insecurity expressed as a need to fix things, situations, and people in order to be worthy of love. I sought to find the magic combination which would make all things okay. Of course, try as I might I never found it. But the desire to try never left me. I brought this into my marriage, unknown to my wife, whose childhood taught her to freely love.
When my sons were born, I was determined to be a better father to them than mine. Even though I did not feel the kind of love I thought a father should, I behaved as if I did. (I did not feel intense emotions particularly positive ones during that time.) I wanted them to know they were precious, loved by me and to feel safe and valued. For the most part I did that. I think it was possible mostly because my wife, their mother, knew and lived that kind of love for them. She modeled the parental love I hoped to live.
We get to pass on a love we did not receive.
Maybe for some of us that is the best kind of love story we get, to pass on a love we did not receive from our parents and nurture in our children a love they can share with others. I see them with their children and know they are far better fathers than I. They love their children and their spouses deeply, with great joy and passion. That is a love story which can live on for generations.
What is your love story? Do you have a story to share? I’d love to talk with you about it. You can reach me at mikedavis@menhealing.org.
Be well. Stay safe. Take good care.
Mike