It Changes Everything

. . . that is what everyone tells you about having a baby, and I've always found it to be kind of an eye-roller.  I mean, lots of things in my life have "changed everything." Reading East of Eden in the tenth grade.  Traveling to Europe more or less on my own as a sixteen-year-old.  Driving my car, loaded, out to St. Louis and coming around the I-70 over the Mississippi to see the arch lit up almost green against the night sky, strange and startling as a lunar landscape.  Someone turning to me at a party on a drizzly, humid fall evening and introducing himself as Sam.  

 

I've always been equally reluctant to abide the chirpily expressed sentiment that you don't really know love until you have a child.  My love for Allison Clare is unlike my love for anyone else in the world, and yet my love for Sam is also unique, as is my love for my parents and my sister and JS and AC's namesake and my dear grandmother.  So, yes, having Allison Clare is one of the many things that have changed everything, and I love her differently from anyone else in my world.

And yet/And so, I think one of the things this past year has taught me is not that these statements are untrue as much as why they are so prevalent, what it is about the bond we share with our children that makes us want to pronounce that love in terms that almost reduce the significance and complexity and respect that we are able to acknowledge in and offer to every other relationship in our lives.  

I can so easily imagine myself being consumed by my love for Allison Clare.  When she was first born, the very constancy of her demands on me--my attention, my body, my emotions, my creativity, my time--lent itself to that kind of intensity.  And as her personality has grown out of its baby-softness, my love for her has also grown more specific; "she's this kind of baby, and not that kind"--therefore, I prefer this kind. 

But here's the thing: my love for Allison Clare is, I realize, a selfish love.  As much as it demands unselfish actions every hour of every day, and as much as it may require me to abandon selfish pursuits and put her needs first, doing things for her is inseparable from doing things for myself.  It would hurt me to see her hurt or in need, and perhaps it's avoiding my own discomfort that makes me want to do things for her.  I think this may be what makes some parents crazily stifling or controlling.  Allison Clare is her own person, and she has been since before she was born; I love her as myself, which is a kind of selfishness that can only be undone, one day, by the sacrifice of myself to her freedom.