the condition of loving
February 8, 2016 § 7 Comments
This summer, in anticipation of our move, I sorted the long procrastinated corners of cluttered shoeboxes, unmarked envelopes, and half-finished family albums for photographs; gathering keepsakes more intentionally into a single box of memories. Images of my childhood and my children’s haphazardly overlapping in a beautiful chaos of sentiment.
As we settle into our new home, I have come to visit these images regularly; a practice that speaks love and connects me more tenderly to the girl I was and the woman I have become. It is an indulgence of time I cherish, meditative and nourishing to my soul. In these moments, I am at once both daughter and mother. More myself and less of myself.
Today my heart rested on a rare image of my father and I. It is the way I most remember loving him; completely and effervescently, eagerly and devotedly. Without pretense or hesitation, with blind trust and unconditional faith.
For those who know me best, it is a relationship complicated by the contradiction of emotions and experience. We are broken and bound by imperfect love.
My mother tells me stories of how my father loved me, but I am most torn by what I do not remember. I have no memory of my father holding me or the sound of his voice forming words of love or praise, encouragement or pride. There is grief in this knowing even as there is peace in his absence, it is no more and no less than the truth between us.
My father is a faded reminder, not of his love, but of my own; paper that holds crisp the condition of loving.
Whatever disappointment may have once accompanied my memories, there is now only a mindfulness for the preciousness of love and the richness of distributing it enthusiastically to those I love least they live unaware of their worth.
I let the love I wish for the girl in those yellowed photographs illuminate the love I give my own children, unconditionally.
scribblechic 
And he gave you those experiences with a very great love…so that you would become exactly who you now are…and give from what has now been created within you.
I can always remember a very good friend of mine asking me which part of me I wanted to change…after my 5,000th rant about how much I hated my father…and after thinking about it I said none.
She then proceeded to let me know that I would not be who I am if I didn’t have the father that I did. And for exactly how I felt he had treated me (at the time, very badly), it did create the person I had become, whether taught by him or in re-action to him.
I was so angry, I didn’t talk to my friend for weeks. Then spirit came for a little chat. It left me very flattened to realise it was only me and my low view of myself that was holding those thoughts. And to really set it in, my dad had been passed away many years at that point…it was only I that was holding onto something, that needed to be seen and released in that understanding.
Changed everything….I finally realised that it was, and always is, me that is holding anything in place in my beliefs. I then realised that I needed to look inside myself to set myself free.
My dad gave me exactly all I needed to find what I was to become…and still is, a love that is inside me 🙂
Beautiful post Marie, thank you for sharing something very close to us all…our memories…they are the wisdom of our future. Namaste
It took me years, Mark, to set aside the heartache of “might have been” for the blessing of what is.
It is a big journey Marie, but so worth it to realise that underneath it all is a love like no other…to learn to love ourselves 🙂
Bitter sweet, and beautiful.
Four little words that cracked my heart wide open. Thank you, Andy.
I am trying so hard to purge things. And yet, photos like the one you posted are so precious, right? Reminders of what once was, even if we can’t quite feel it . . . beautiful post.
Photographs and handwritten letters are the necessary indulgences to be preserved with care. Paper time capsules.