unconditional love

ok. before i begin this post, i want to clearly say... generally, i am in favor of unfettered free speech (except spam--i DESPISE spam, and delete it). however. with this post, i'd like to request that people not leave any comments that are just to say things like "oh, poor you for having that experience" or anything like that. sometimes, sympathy is something i can't handle. if you feel you must, go ahead. but please don't feel obligated to say something, ok? thanks.

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I wish you hope, that keeps you looking toward tomorrow
and away from yesterday.
I wish you faith, in yourself and all humanity
and the belief that we will finally live as one.
I wish you joy, I wish you peace,
I wish you more than you will need.
I wish you unconditional love.

~~from Unconditional Love, by The Four Bitchin' Babes.

i started thinking about this post because of a conversation i had with w last night. even at the time, i knew i was asking kind of unfair questions. the kind of questions where, even though i wanted her to tell the truth, there was really only one truth that wasn't going to upset me.

you see, i asked her if, had she known how our lives would unfold, would she have chosen to be in a relationship with me. and she couldn't give me an unqualified yes. some of that is just w--she *thinks* too much about these questions, or she doesn't hear the question behind the one i ask. and i ask those questions, because i know she will give the automatic answer if i ask "do you love me? do you REALLY love me? do you love me unconditionally?" and i don't trust the automatic answer to be true. so i ask questions that have less automatic answers.

in my life, my experience of love has not been unconditional. growing up, i was taught that the path to being loved was fraught with danger. and to a child, or at least, to me as a child, love was the source of things like a reliable place to live, food, clothing, shelter. and, oh yeah, that emotional nurturing that is supposed to be so important.

but my experience of love was that it could be easily taken away. if i could not discern what the adults around me wanted, they would stop loving me. if i could not be good enough, or if i asked for things they were unwilling or unable to give, the love would be taken away. depending on the adult in question, that could mean that they would abuse me physically or emotionally, or it would mean that they just stopped noticing me.

and yet, in many ways, being noticed in a way i was told was loving could be equally dangerous. because sometimes, being noticed meant getting something perhaps intended as "positive" attention from people who really didn't consistently understand what it meant to be nurturing to a child, and how just because you're touching someone doesn't mean you're touching them... there. or in that way.

so i was not an especially cuddly child, to say the least. which also led to punishment, because if i couldn't accept nurturing love, the occasionally appropriate kind, the adults in my life would get furious. why was i rejecting them? why was i saying, with my body language, that i didn't appreciate their love? because that's what goes through the mind of a six month old, or a three year old, or even a ten year old. and because, clearly, being furious and raging is going to teach that child to accept nurturing when it's available.

there were adults in my life, people in my life who were not violent, who were not abusive in any way. but for my first five years, i didn't have any extended experience of that. so by the time i got to school, i understood the positive attention i got from teachers as being based entirely on my ability to be good--to learn quickly, to not ask for any extra effort, to help where it was needed without getting in the way. and let me tell you, it was much easier to follow the explicitly stated rules of school than it was to follow the invisible twisting path at home.

but here's the thing. you know how they say in trainings for people working with kids, that kids will seek out negative attention if they aren't able to get positive attention? that may be true for some kids. not so much for me. i didn't fully trust positive attention anyways, since i never could understand when positive attention was going to be safe. so i certainly avoided negative attention, and was fairly undemanding of other attention. if it seemed freely offered, i would take it. but i certainly didn't seek it out.

i learned not even to rely on family members who weren't abusive, because for whatever reasons, they tended to... well, to be unreliable. my father is a big example of this. i didn't meet him until i was eight. then, for the next 2 1/2 years, we wrote to each other, and i spent some vacations with him. and then he stopped writing, stopped having me to visit. he never really said why. he just stopped. for a lot of reasons, that just reinforced the message that there was something wrong with me, something that kept people from being able to care about me, to love me, to give me attention in ways that were safe.

yes, i had teachers. and i am grateful for them. but for the most part, teachers were something transitory. built into the relationship was that it was time-limited. it was a teacher's *job* to teach, and the would do it no matter how you behaved. when a teacher was kind, it still fell into my vision of what they were supposed to do.

looking back, with all the various times i can remember teachers going out of their way for me, it occurs to me that they actually cared about me, as a person, separate from what they were "required" to do. but it never once occurred to me, growing up, that a teacher would want to see me when they weren't being paid to do so. it never occurred to me to go back to see a teacher after i was no longer taking classes with them. because my baseline experience was that people only spent time with me when they felt they had to, that people only allowed me to be around so long as it benefitted them.

growing up, i somehow picked up the message that one's family is supposed to love a person unconditionally. and since it was pretty clear to me that my family did *not* love me unconditionally, i took away the lesson lots of kids in that situation do: that there was something about *me* that caused me to be less lovable. that this wasn't the fault of the people who were unable to love me, but something about me, as a person.

at some point in high school or college, i found out that my mother had had an abortion. (disclaimer: don't get me wrong. even with this particular experience, i am 100% pro-choice. people have every right in the world to determine for themselves what happens when they are pregnant.)

the thing is, my mother's story about how she had decided to have the abortion reinforced some really negative lessons i had already learned.

when i was a few months old, she divorced my father. and then she found out she was pregnant. i assume there were a lot of reasons she would have decided to have an abortion. i mean, being a single parent with three kids already, and not much money, having an abortion or giving the child up for adoption, would probably have been a good idea. had she decided to do this because she didn't think she could be a good parent, while it might have been kind of sad, i could see her point.

but the thing is, the reason she told me she had the abortion was because she was concerned the baby would be dark-skinned. my father is black, my mother (and the rest of my family) are white. she didn't feel she could go back and not have *me*, but the subtext as it came across to me was, "had i known what would happen, i wouldn't have chosen to have a biracial child."

i know there are parts who have often understood that the "wrong, unlovable" thing about me is the color of my skin. too "white" for my black father to want to have anything to do with me (or for the black kids in middle school not to beat me up for it); too "black" for my white (and rather racist) family to fully accept me. they coped with me by insisting i wasn't "really" black, but at the same time, my skin color came up pretty often. the conditions i understood for being loved required that i deny basic parts of who i am; and also that i not cause trouble, that i be hyper-good, simply because i was only loved on sufferance, and should i ever be difficult, i would be dangerously rejected.

and knowing that there had been the possibility that i would have had a sibling, someone who would have been my full-blooded sibling, who would have looked more like me, who would have been close to me in age... how much of the pain and loneliness and isolation i experienced growing up, how much of that might have been alleviated if my mother had chosen to carry the pregnancy to term, and have the child? at the same time, knowing what i know now... would i choose to subject someone else to what i grew up with? no. so i'm not going to say my mother shouldn't have had the abortion, because i can't see that it would have benefitted whichever soul eventually came to reside in that collection of cells.


okay, so where was i going with this post? oh, right.

so knowing all of this, knowing all of my experience of rejection, i was talking to w about my difficulty with trusting her. and i said, "it's really unfair to you, the fact that it's so hard for me to trust. because no matter how trustworthy you are, the hurdle you've got to get over to achieve my trust is set immensely high."

and w gave me the strangest look.

"unfair for me?" she asked.

because, ok, sure, it's kind of difficult for me, too. but i guess i'm used to it. i'm used to not being able to trust that anyone will love me unconditionally. but w isn't. she has mostly known people who were able to give and receive unconditional love. and here she is, in a long-term relationship, kind of stuck with someone who is always braced for rejection.

so yeah, to me, it seems harder on her. because she isn't doing anything wrong. because she isn't the one who hurt me. and yet, she's the one who gets the fallout from all of the pain i grew up with. and i'm less able to be a good partner to her because of that. we won't even get into the fact that she thought she was getting into a relationship with an adult, and seems instead to have gotten stuck with this whole mess of teenagers and little kids, and the adults have now been gone for seven months, with no idea of when they will return. so to me, it seems like the one getting the really unfair part is w. (yeah, i know. it's something i'll discuss in therapy.)

i do wish for hope, and for the ability to look towards the future rather than the past. but sometimes, the past gets in the way, and makes it awfully hard to build up the faith that unconditional love is even a possibility.