Love is a verb

We grow up, and live with many sayings about love: Love conquers all… Love is a many splendored thing… Love the one you’re with … Love makes the world go round... to name a few.  While growing up, I didn’t mean to take these as ‘gospel truths’, but persistent messaging somehow got inside and created a form of expectation.  I believed that people who loved each other would be naturally drawn to treat each other well - always. This one thing has been the greatest disappointment of my life.  Not only in others, but also in myself.

I have expected a certain kind of ‘love-enhanced’ treatment from all of the people who love me: my mom, my siblings, my dad, my husband and my friends.  When it hasn’t turned out; I believed that there was something wrong with me and that I was fundamentally unworthy of (true) love.  If that wasn’t hard enough to bear, I also learned that I am not capable of treating my loved one’s well, all the time either. 

Humbling.

Parenting has been a bigger struggle for me than I had anticipated. Despite my best efforts to chart my own course towards marriage and parenthood, I simply did not have the control that I imagined, and could not have known my destiny.  We are dealing with unique parenting challenges due to the circumstances of forming our family.  We are the quintessential ‘nuclear’ family, with children born during my husband’s first marriage, a child born to us, and children born to us through adoption.  Moreover, our adopted children have each lived a portion of their lives without us, which means that they have experiences that we have not shared in and have no knowledge of, but that they are affected by, all the same.

The past several months have been extremely emotionally intense due to a hundred different reasons.  We have been called upon to parent through situations that we had, quite literally, never experienced in our short lifetimes.  We have ‘lost our sea legs’ and at times feel quite adrift.  Nonetheless, with grace and debauchery we've had to forge ahead.

During the holiday season, I had an epiphany.  I had a flash of thought – love is a verb. It was from years past, when I had begun to read Stephen Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.  He writes, “Love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is the fruit of love the verb or our loving actions. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her.”  My awareness about the relationship between behavior and love grew.

Often we expect that love should happen naturally and bring out the best of us in any situation.  What I realized over the holidays is that in choosing love as a verb it is actually an intention, or an action instead of a reaction.  Love and behavior do not implicate one another.  Behavior might result from feeling loved, but it may also come from any number of other feelings – surprised, afraid, confident, anxious, ashamed, lonely, jealous, grateful, and so on.

What this has manifested in me is the wherewithal to pause when I am facing my child's irrational behavior, intense emotional outbursts and verbal attacks, so that I can ask myself – Is there one loving thing that I can do?  I realize that I can act in a loving way even if (and especially when) I don’t feel loving (or loved).  This is huge, as I can put my – I don’t deserve this – card away and pull out my – treat others the way you want to be treated – card.  It really shifts my perspective about relationships and it also increases my capacity to attune, in the midst of confusion and chaos.

This is my daughter, Lauren and my Grama.  Circa 2006.