Knowing Love

I've never been in love before.

That’s not an easy thing to say. There’s shame in that confession. A quiet belief that maybe I was never good enough to be loved, so I never really learned how to love.

Let me explain.

My first love was at sixteen. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to being in love, I think. He loved me unconditionally, without demand. For over two years, he showed it in every way he knew how. He tried, constantly, to make sure I knew.

But we were young. The kinds of arguments that an experienced heart would dismiss as small, felt monumental at the time. Mountains we didn’t know how to climb. And eventually, it ended.

Since then, I’ve loved, but I haven’t been in love. That feeling has stayed out of reach.

One of my favorite books is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. It’s about a china rabbit who doesn’t understand love. He knows his owner, a young girl named Abilene, adores him, but he doesn’t return her feelings. Then he’s lost overboard from the Queen Mary, and spends years drifting through different homes, different hands, different hearts. Only through all those losses does he finally learn what love truly means.

When I was a little girl, love felt like something I had to earn. Abuse, neglect, addiction, those things lived in my home. I tried so hard, even through the pain, to get my mother to love me as fiercely as I loved her.

It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I finally stopped chasing it.

When I had my children, my heart, still scared, burst wide open. I took all the things that once hurt me and turned them into lessons. I give my kids the love I never had. I pour everything into them.

A few months ago, my son and I read Edward Tulane together. It was his first chapter book without pictures. Every night, he’d crawl into my chair, and we’d go with Edward on his journey. That book changed us both.

After we finished, my son kept searching for his own Edward. But there are no real replicas. So for Easter, I tried. I can only hand sew, but I gave it everything I had. I found a rabbit online that looked close enough. I bought fabric, fur, buttons. I sewed him a coat, I’d never made sleeves before. I added ruffled trim, painted silver buttons gold, lined his ears with fur, just like Edward.

There was a time when I believed I may never know a mother's love. That I would never feel the magic of unconditional love that only a mother can give, but that was not true. I just was the one who gave it instead. 

There was also a time when I believed that being in love wasn’t real. That people just settled. That love, in the way I imagined it, didn’t really happen.

But just because I didn’t grow up being loved well doesn’t mean I can’t love well.

And maybe I haven’t been in love yet. But that doesn’t mean I’m incapable. Or unworthy.

It just means that when love finally shows up, I’ll be able to recognize it, 

because it won’t look like anything I’ve ever known.