Thoughts on Unconditional Love and Holding the Broken Parts

Unraveling the childhood double binds with tiny babies

Just picture two little babies with their wide eyes and squirmy clumsy bodies needing you to feed them and clothe them and bathe them and hold them and make sure they’re safe. Their little arms reach out when you come near because they want to be picked up and held by you. When you put them down they cry out because, after all, they’re just little babies and they want to be in your arms.

This is our lives right now. Life with two little babies. There’s a lot of love around here.

The other day Alice, who has way more experience with children than I do, says: “They’re only just beginning to express their love for us. It’s going to get so much deeper.”

I paused. There was something about that thought which landed odd for me and made me feel strangely sad. I’m very comfortable with the love I’m feeling for our babies, it feels really good to love so much. But suddenly this feeling was hitting me and I’ll try to translate it to something like this:

We brought these people into the world. We are taking care of them. They are our children. We love them unconditionally and it feels really good. But why do we expect they will love us deeply and unconditionally? Is that just part of the deal: you love your parents because they brought you into this world and take care of you? Is this just what people do to be loved?

Or, maybe that’s not quite it.

Maybe it’s something like:

There are so many people in the world who are emotionally broken and they have children who then end up inheriting their brokenness, and they are forced to love those people because they are their parents. Maybe I’m one of those people.

So I said something like that.

Alice, in her endearingly straight-forward style, said she thought that was a fucked up way to think.

And it probably is. It’s also that line of thinking that kept me from having kids all these years. It felt like a selfish thing to do, bringing people into the world. I’m showing my dark under layers by saying this stuff out loud. I’m all love and wonder on the surface but down below I have really cynical and broken parts. I’m just being real with you, it’s part of who I am, take it or leave it.

Love is a verb: it’s something we do. There’s that expression “making love” that the humans in my culture use to talk about sex when it’s nice sex. I never really thought about it until I got Alice pregnant. You can actually make things with sex, babies, to be specific. But I guess the “making love” doesn’t stop with the sex. Alice and I are making love all the time these days with how we raise these babies and how we relate to each other in the process. Our love is very active and if we love these babies a whole lot then I suppose they’ll love us back with all that love we’ve put into them.

But it’s obviously more complicated. I was raised by two parents that loved me a whole lot. But they genuinely hated each other, and played out a war with my little life where I ended up pitted against both of them. For many years. It was like a complex multilayered double bind of a childhood that greatly contributed to me becoming “mentally ill” as a teenager. I learned not to trust love, not from anyone, not even from myself. I was materially taken care of, I was loved by my parents, but it was a very emotionally unstable situation because the people raising me were not attuned to what was happening with me or each other. “Love” was a very confusing thing that looked like conflict and rage and frustration and grudges and bitterness.

I make my living talking to people who grew up in these kinds of situations so I think about them a lot.

But how do I know that I’m any different than the people who raised me to be so cynical about love? They did the best they could, they were good people. Everyone does the best they can, but there are a lot of emotionally broken people walking around out there.

My journey has involved a lot of years of emotionally evolving and growing with a lot of teachers and partners along the way. There have been a bunch of people who got close to me that had to deal with my heartbroken, cynical, scared, cruel, selfish parts. And I still have those parts inside me, but now I have a better relationship with them, and most of them have a better relationship with each other. The key is awareness and a lot of self compassion. It’s as if they were my own children I’ve been carrying around all these years.

I chose to have these babies because I trusted that my broken and cynical parts weren’t going to be the ones raising them. But I love my broken parts too and I think they make me who I am. I know we’re going to end up hurting these kids in the process of raising them, that’s just part of the deal. I aspire to us all continuing to grow the love that’s happening in this house right now.

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