Love is the Sweetest Thing

Love is in the air, or so the people who sell products based on February 14th would have us believe. That cupid and his puny arrow will strike if you supply enough chocolate, nasty underwear, diamonds, candy hearts or folded sheets of cardstock with “Be Mine” italicized in Arial script. Valentine’s Day has never seemed like a big deal to me. I got my first period on Valentine’s Day. The association stuck, despite thirty-two years to just get over it.

Love, however, is a big deal to me in whatever form: familial, romantic, maternal, gastronomic, you name it.

Love for a baby is a tsunami of emotion, mowing down everything in its path. The smell of your baby hits you like a ton of pheromonal bricks, making you willing to lose sleep with a smile, breast feed with mastitis or fight off a cougar with a ketchup bottle. Love for a child, likewise, can make you Tiger-like, the desire to pluck the playground bully off his feet and toss him like a limp rag to the asphalt after he calls your offspring a bad name one too many times all too tempting.

If socially inappropriate. 

Even your teenager can bring that panting, tortured, desperate parental love back to the surface when he or she has a moment of vulnerability, a first date or goes off to college.

Last spring, I learned how close to the surface that life-changing kind of love can be, and that for me, precipices bring it to a boil.

Being a Pacific Northwest family, naturally, we went camping last spring break. We watched movies in the tent trailer on a portable DVD player, walked on the beach, collected rocks, ate tortilla chips and guac’ and made mad dashes to the heated restroom between storms. We also, at my instigation, took a two-and-a-half mile hike around a lighthouse set in a breathtakingly beautiful forest edged by terrifying precipices.

I should have thought to check the elevation.

I’ve always been nervous about heights, but the lack of railings between my loved ones and a hundred-foot drop onto rocks made me into a wreck. Add on a teenage boy (with the typical urge to push the boundaries) stepping close to the edge again and again, bringing his six year-old brother (low on common sense but strong on survival, thank goodness) along with him, and I was sobbing and unable to stop.

To clarify—I was terrified. I didn’t vow never to hike again. I wouldn’t even deny our teenagers the right to hike near precipices—they have excellent coordination and good judgment (for the most part), I just can’t be there when it happens. It also came to me, like an epiphany, how vulnerable loving anyone really is.

I was behind my wife and our three kids, watching them, and realized how my heart was sliced into intentional pieces and sewn into them all, carried wherever they went. I loved them so much, it took my breath away, and the thought of one of them stumbling and falling just about crippled me.

I was never so happy for a hike to be over. 

Loving is such a freefall; a jump without a parachute into a lifetime rush, never knowing when the ground will rise up and meet you. But looking at my family (while sobbing silently and trying to keep a stiff upper lip for the six year-old’s sake), the gasping irrevocability of that love was worth it.

 

Blogger Bio: Beren deMotier is a Carol Brady in Levis/tattooed lesbian mama in a mini-van, obsessed with safety, doing the right thing and the amount of dog hair on her wood floors. She is a regular contributor to both Curve and Black Lamb, and has written for Hip Mama, And Baby, Pride Parenting, ehow.com, and for her blog, “That Lesbian Mom Next Door.” Her multi-award-winning book, The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage, recounts her giddy leap through a legal window, straight onto the barbeque pit of public debate when she and her partner married in Oregon in 2004, their three children along for the raucous ride. (berendemotier.com)

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