I wish I could verbalize it, I’m certainly not a poet and not even the English major that is the wife, but I’ll give it a shot.
Love is a multifaceted thing. You love your parents. You can love a partner. You can love a friend. You can love a pet. All of these are pretty different and have a number of different levels of both intensity and depth of meaning, but love is the word that we have here, so please bear with me.
When you become a parent, whether it’s a nurse handing you a gooey person, an agency approving you for adoption, or whatever it is, you are introduced to a love that suddenly comes with a level of responsibility that you never had to deal with.
Your parents will love you no matter what. Your spouse has entered into this willingly and will be okay if you split. Your friends will miss you if you grow apart but be okay. Your pet will even be fine if you leave. All of these you’re dealing with a being who is their own being already.
But with a kid the level of responsibility is much, much higher. Huge stakes. They look to you for guidance in everything. They aren’t complete, they’re looking for help on how to do any of it. Ride the subway, pay the pizza guy, talk to a barista, any and all interactions become some kind of educational experience, some chance to learn how any of it works. Including how you wake up. How you make dinner. How you deal with everything now has a little person watching and learning and copying how to interact with the world.
And so, if your goal is to leave the world a better place than when you arrived, there is a responsibility to be a better person all the time at any time. Your kid wakes you up at two in the morning because they peed the bed? You have to fix the problem while letting them know it’s no big thing. Even if you just got home from work an hour ago and collapsed into bed. Kid wrecks that model spaceship you had since you were their age? Well, in the end it’s just a thing, calm yourself down. You kid hauls off and hits you in the face for telling them no for one thing or another? You’re not going to be the kind of person who hits a seven year old, are you?
You have to take the hit and resolve yourself to be better next time to make it so they don’t get to the point where they want to hit anyone. That is literally on you to solve another person’s behavior and make them a better person. Because they are also your legacy. They color the relationship you have with your own parents because now you have a better grasp of their perspective. You want to share things with your kids that your grandparents taught you. You start to see how humanity lives and creeps forward at tiny steps because you have contributed to it in a new and different way. You are making a new thing that will continue on long after you’re gone.
Because you also start to think that you are going to be gone. That it is a real thing. The taste of birth has a very real flip side and you do not want anyone to pass too early, especially not your kid. It’s probably less about making life worth living and more about making sure that you are there for them to help them through anything when they turn to you. It’s a big responsibility that you lay on yourself and why you see a lot of parents suddenly look into healthier living and taking care of themselves, they realize that someone needs them a lot more than they ever understood before.
A little rambling, and for that I apologize, but hopefully it lets you see why I can’t click that link above. Thinking about the loss of one of my kids makes me think an awful lot about what I could do to prevent it, and an unpreventable tragedy like the one mentioned above would make me spend the rest of my life wondering what I could have done differently that day and if there was anything else I could have sacrificed instead.
