Our mornings, now that I do drop-off every day, go like this: we drive to school, inevitably finding “rockstar parking” (as per Grace) because of my chronic earliness problem. We walk through the Morse Building, where the youngest classrooms are, (beginners, kindergarten, 1st grade) and then proceed through the playground to the area where Grace waits with the other “big kids” to go into the building at 8:10. She gives me a big hug, Whit a grudging one, and heads off, her enormous backpack strapped to her back, to find her friends.
Whit and I then head back, hand-in-hand, to the Morse Building. We sit in the lobby, on the little bench outside the nurse’s office. Many times, we’ve had this conversation:
“Whit, my preference would be to sit with you until 8:10 and then to walk into your classroom with you.”
“Mummy, my preference is to go to Early Dropoff with Peter.”
Until Peter arrives, though, I get a few precious minutes sitting next to Whit. We talk about school, his friends, whatever is on his mind. This is the spot where last year he asked about my feelings and then revealed he was interested in the feeling of pain he gave me when he kicked my leg.
This morning we sat in companionable silence for a few moments, Whit curled up next to me, leaning into my side. I squeezed his shoulder with my arm, leaned down to kiss his ever-so-short hair, and whispered, “I love you, Whitty.” He looked up at me, an intent look in his eyes.
“Do you love me more than you love yourself?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Whit. Maybe,” I chewed my lip. What do I actually think about this?
“That’s pretty selfish, don’t you think, Mummy?”
People were beginning to fill the lobby. The subculture of dropoff (whose costume is Lululemon yoga pants, Tom Ford sunglasses, a venti Starbucks cup, and a big designer handbag) was in full effect. This suddenly felt like a very personal conversation to be having. Whit has a way of plunging from the surface to the deep depths of a topic with little warning. It can make you dizzy.
“Well, Whit, I do think we have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else.”
He leaned back against me, his brow furrowed, obviously thinking about it.
“How about this,” he looked back up at me, poking my shoulder to make sure I was meeting his eyes. “How about you love me the same amount as you love yourself?”
“Deal,” I said, giving him a hug. Peter walked into the doors at that moment and Whit fled, barely giving me a backward look, following his best friend into the Early Dropoff room.
It made me think, though. Certainly Erica Jong’s interesting WSJ piece last weekend, which so lit up the blogosphere, implied that the current cultural norm is to put our children above all else. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I would not describe myself as terrifically good at self-love, or as having particularly strong self-esteem, and I also have a great deal of anxiety about and a profound desire not to be selfish. At the same time my instinct is that Whit’s proposal is probably about right. What do you think?
Erica Jong and her highly accurate observations aside, there is no way I can elect to love these two children of mine one mite more or less. And the truth is that while I have a pretty damn healthy self-regard, I love them more. Way more, and it grows daily.
But what Whit is talking about, I think, is the wish we all have as children not to be overwhelmed by our parents’ love. As parents, we can’t help but love them too much. But we can remember (as I KNOW you do… I’ve seen it in action) to keep that love in the background, rather than making it the star of their show.
In practice, this means that your love is there pretty much whenever and wherever Whit wants it, but that he can feel OK about “preferring” to play with Peter in the morning, knowing that your love is not dependent on his choice.
What a great piece to wake up to, Lindsey.
I actually hadn’t read the Jong essay until now. I’m still trying to process. On the one hand, I think that parents who spend every waking hour with their children are not just harming themselves, they are denying their children the important joys of becoming independent. Like Grace and White, my little Marissa (now 6) doesn’t want me to walk her to her classroom anymore. It makes me feel a little sad, but it also makes me feel proud that she is so independent.
On the other hand, the practices of the 19th century, when parents were encouraged to avoid their children, seem cruel and inhumane to our modern sensibilities.
Surely there has to be a happy medium, but that medium probably differs for every child and every parent. The equilibrium point depends on the personalities of both–there is no hard and fast rule for optimal parenting.
Jong concludes, “Do the best you can. There are no rules.” I don’t believe that’s correct. To me, there are three rules:
1) Respect your child’s needs and wants.
2) Respect your own needs and wants. You need to seek a sustainable level of effort.
3) Do what makes you both happy.
What a great post, Lindsey!
I can’t comment on the Erica Jong thing – have been focused on other things, but I do know this: in order to love anyone else fully, you have to love and accept yourself. Period.
This doesn’t mean to focus on yourself and neglect your children’s needs. It really doesn’t have to do with needs or time. Just a knowing that you are really truly ok with who you are. Love comes from there….
Just my two cents…
So grateful to you for this piece, and to the previous commenters for sharing their thoughts.
Sometimes I worry that the reason I am not fully at ease with my job as a stay-at-home mom is that I am too selfish, or, to use the language of this post, that I love myself too much. I don’t doubt that I love my kids immeasurably, but I wonder sometimes if I love myself more than a person who loves 2+ others immeasurably can. And that there’s not enough room in one life for that much love for self and for everybody else.
I do know that my best days are when I take care of them and take care of me. So maybe Whit’s onto something. And maybe the scales will dive and dip at different times, but, ultimately, we love ourselves and we love our kids beyond reason.
I think he’s right.
And I think the love of ourselves and our children is so intertwined. I think loving them can help us love ourselves, and then there comes a whole new level of love for our children based on new found love of ourself. Acceptance of our selves, more like it?
(I just read a chapter of Brene Brown’s Gifts of Imperfection on this very topic… have you read it yet?)
Interesting. I do think that you can love someone else without loving your own self. I think that some amount of selfishness is good though. Mothers need to make time for themselves as a person outside of their roles as a parent to truly be a good parent. It’s good for the mom and good for the child to see that they are not the complete center of the universe, that other people have needs that might supersede their own.
I agree with him, if you don’t love yourself, it is very hard to truly give the love that someone else needs. You may still love them, but it is much harder to show it.
And anyways, loving someone more than yourself is not a descision, it’s just something that you realize in the quiet moments once in a while.
I think Whit is wise beyond his years. I love those quiet moments when my sons talk and share their feelings. Sometimes it’s difficult to love ourselves, but it’s always easy to love them.
I have been thinking about this post for a few hours. Echoing in my mind has been this, from Lindsey’s post from yesterday:
“I’m humbled tonight, again, by the complicated, nascent human beings I live with. I’m certain, as I’ve always been, that they do not belong to me – they are just passing through, and it is my honor to shelter them as I share these magic years.”
…which moves me deeply. Especially the recognition that it is an honor to love one’s children, to care for them and shepherd them towards their own life’s fulfillment.
When I first read today’s post, I was confused, and I thought perhaps that Whit was somwhow saying it was selfish to love a child more than oneself. On Twitter, Lindsey told me he meant it was selfish to love oneself more, which certainly makes more sense.
But I’ve also been thinking of this in the context of the wise and honest comment Launa made above, about “the wish we all have as children not to be overwhelmed by our parents’ love.”
I do not have children of my own, and I acknowledge perhaps I would feel very differently about this if I did. But I am the child of a mother who would definitely have said she loved me more than she loved herself, and would have held that up as the mark of a good mother. For me, I experienced that as overwhelming and even kind of literally all-consuming.
And I think there can be something kind of selfish about that kind of love.
I do want to say that my mother, who has had a life of great pain and burden, I really think she just simply longed, from inside the darkness of that pain, to simply be loved. Utterly human. Utterly real. No blame.
And yet, if she had been able to love herself more, I think she might have been able to demand less from me, and it would have been easier for me to have given her the love she wanted.
It’s like, why are we loving in the first place? That might be an odd question.
But is our first impulse in love to give, or to receive?
To see in one’s child their own true authentic being, not as an extension of oneself, but as their own distinct being…
And then to see it an honor to love that child, to me is clearly a profoundly generous and even sacred way to give love.
And I would perhaps hazard that it’s a larger giving-love than the giving-love a lot of women often give to themselves.
And maybe that’s the problem.
I think it’s exactly that giving-love, to ourselves, that we long for, as women, in cultivating our necessary, hard-fought and hard-won, self-love.
And in that giving-love, it’s not a zero-sum game, where more love for one means less love for another.
Perhaps, then, the question isn’t exactly which is more, love for oneself or love for a child, but what is the direction of that love, to give or to receive?
And how do we ensure that we receive enough, so that we have enough within ourselves, so that we are able to give to others?
…or that we have enough within ourselves, to be able to give to ourselves?
And therein lies the crux of motherhood, the very problem that brings so many of us to our knees. The guilt of loving ourselves versus the intensity of loving our children. I need to think about this some more. But just now I would say I love my children more.
Oh Whit. Oh goodness Whit. Such wisdom and inspired insight, delivered before dashing off to a dear friend’s side.
I agree with Whit. And you. You gotta start at the top, loving yourself. If we don’t love and prioritize ourselves, we do not impart that ability to our children.
xo
Your children are amazing! What a little boy! What a question. I think you answered it perfectly.
I loved reading this post and the comments. I think I love my kids too much, which pretty much means I smother them and neglect myself, which doesn’t do anyone any good.
It’s a good thing love is boundless, isn’t it? There’s always more for everyone (even ourselves).
The idea of measuring love has been on my mind since the days of reading my daughter “Guess how much I love You”. (To the moon -and back). And how we (like the bunny and his father) would one-up each other in our declarations of love. This would typically segue into who loves whom more…do I love daddy more? Me more? and so on. And the answer was always the same: not more, just different. A cop-out, possibly.
And yet, I think HOW we love our children can be of incredible value into understanding how we love ourselves. We forgive our children for not getting perfect grades (as long as they tried their best), yet can we apply that same level of forgiveness of ourselves when WE don’t knock something out of the park (we tried our best, didn’t we)? Our hearts bleed when they are hurt by their “friends” and advise them to stay away from such monstrosity, yet we allow bullies to take up space in our own lives.
I often coach clients from this perspective: “if you were your own parent, what would you want for yourself”. (I realize that out of context, this question sounds like a bit of a parlour trick, and yet, it truly can be powerful).
Thank you, Lindsey, for inviting us all in to your thoughts. What richness, as ever/
XO
TG
I’m a little late to the party, and I haven’t read EJ’s piece…but I do know from experience (personal and professional) that self-love has to come first. We might believe that we can love fiercely without an intense and strong self-love, but it’s not true. In order to step into the fullness of love for another, we have to accept and love ourselves first. And that may be the hardest part to love. Just my 2 cents. xo
Maybe love is not a measure but a game of cosmic tag in which we realize our true Self to be love. Whit makes his point well: you are it.
“To see in one’s child their own true authentic being, not as an extension of oneself, but as their own distinct being…
And then to see it [as] an honor to love that child, to me is clearly a profoundly generous and even sacred way to give love.”
Karen, this is a fantastically good, and I think fantastically accurate comment, and a lovely addition to Lindsey’s post. I also think it applies to anyone we love, not just children.
I would add that it’s pretty hard to *be* “loved” by someone who doesn’t really love themselves. Hard in all sorts of ways.