unconditioning love (pt 1?)
on spinning shadow into gold
Waves I & Waves II by Giordanne Salley
“Look! Look at all the angels!” He loves to tell this story. He saw an empty choir bannister, but my six-year-old-self swore she saw more. I couldn’t tell you, I don’t remember it now. If I had to guess, I probably saw shadows. I only know the story because he keeps telling it. I like that he does, it’s fun to imagine.
Some relationships are more complicated than others. I read the discourse. Is love conditional? Is love unconditional? If you love it unconditionally, do “you” love “it” at all? I used to say “not everyone gets to experience unconditional love, because not everyone gets that from their parents, and that’s the only place it’s appropriate.” This used to make me feel pretty sorry for myself, but it doesn’t anymore. I think everyone feels this to different degrees. Everyone’s parents are just parents, including mine.
My mom is the only person in her family who still talks to her dad. Her dad is the meanest, just ask his eleventh wife, or any of them. My mom calls him every Monday on her way to work. I asked her why once. “It’s an eleven minute drive. I can do anything for eleven minutes.” “No mom, why?” “The Lord commands me to honor my Father.” I used to think less of her for this, but I don’t anymore. Everyone’s parents are just parents, including ours.
I think capacity to love is conditional; conditioned from the moment a warm chest smothers screaming breath. For us, conditions swirled in the air like secondhand smoke. It could wreak enough to choke, hold your breath, longer with conditioning. Then we didn’t really notice anymore, different conditioning. We learned to claim our own conditions — how we like to love and how we like to feel love. We found pockets of better air. They felt so rare we wanted to contain them, but that’s a fatal solution. The act of breathing itself changes the air. The act of breathing itself changes us.
Lord, help me to let go of my anxieties and trust in you. Help me to love my children like you do - unconditionally, fully. I shouldn’t have, but I went through the book I found in her room titled How to Parent Adult Children. I think about what she wrote in it frequently.
Maybe love can be unconditional, but capacity to love isn’t, so relationships aren’t. So sometimes it feels like the whole ordeal suffocates in tightly held conditions, stuck with only sadder places to go, converted into grief. But the act of loving, truly loving, eats away at all the conditions that aren’t love, until love is free.
“That’s so tough, different circumstances, but I’m estranged from my family too. It's ultimately freeing.” “I'm so glad that's been freeing for you. Different circumstances, but we actually do still talk. Only in ways I find healthy for where I'm at, and maybe I’m delulu, but I think things will get better in time.” “Seriously?” “Why not? I’m changing for the better, so one way or another, things will get better. This process feels right to me.”
*
We’re moving through rapidly changing conditions. Sometimes this process moves faster than I can process, but I’m still asking the questions: how to hold on, how to hold back, how to let go, all at once and in evolving ways? Do you like how this feels? How I’m holding you? I want it to feel good, how you hold me, but of course sometimes it hurts. It’s hard to hold a difficult position, and I know this is a difficult position for you. Sometimes it hurts how I hold myself, and that’s probably the deeper reason for the pain, anyways. It’s okay, I know you never mean to hurt me, and my pain is my task.
So I find the ways I can hold you, and the ways I can let you hold me. I learn how to bend and where to break. I get comfortable with this because I finally realized that I’ll ultimately face my own uncomfortable parts one way or another. I can work them out with my dad:mom, I can work them out with clones of my dad:mom, I can work them out by showing up in ways that create my dad:mom. So why not just work it out with my dad:mom? I have a dad, and I have a mom, and I don’t want to replace them. I want to love who they were, who they are, and who they are becoming.
So I set and reset boundaries. These little moments create opportunities for uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes they are way more recursive than hoped, sometimes they are way more transformative than expected. It’s not so romantic, sometimes I get tired of holding tension. I find a way to release it, then I find a way to pick it back up. Because change is a patient process, and we’re all open to letting love change us. And when you’re open to this, practice doesn’t make perfect. It’s perfect already. It’s where effort meets grace, and each moment is abundantly new.
“I love you, C. Always will.” “You too, Dad.” Love is will. You have to want it. Capacity to love is skill, and any skill can be learned, but you have to want to learn it, and you have to be brave enough to try. It’s a precious gift to hold you, now, just as you are. If we’re going to hold each other closer, and I want to hold each other closer, there’s a lot we’re going to have to let go.
I let go of as much as possible—drop some dynamics, hold some in forbearance, transcend some in grace. I let go, I find a distance I can hold you at, and I hold so much back. I can always let “you” go, because I don’t want to give you up. If I wanted to, I would. And if I’m honest, I like what letting you go just to breathe you back in a little deeper does to me, how it expands my capacity. Not just to freely love you, but to freely love me, to freely love them.
And that’s it, right? Create the story, forget it, keep telling it, until we know it in our bloody chambered hearts, until it’s fun to imagine, until it’s fun to create.
***
Beloved, shadows are a matter of perspective born to dance with light. Beloved, remember, above sun spun clouds the light never stops shining.
Influences
“working through your triggers is realizing that your lovers were just lovers, your job is just a job, your personality is just a personality, your parents were just parents. the world is simply the world. none of it was ever a big deal. none of it was ever a problem” -
“The five actions of god within you: create, maintain, dissolve, forget, remember.” - @loopy
“forgive as much as possible, if only for one’s own freedom” -@tasshinfogleman