For many of us (though not all), there comes a point during pregnancy, the matching process or maybe shortly after birth where you experience this “rush of love”.
But how true is that love? When does the real love start?
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I’ve been lucky enough to feel that feeling twice. The first time, I was much younger and I didn’t get to meet the life that first made me a father. The second time, I did get to meet the life that made me a father again. She came into our lives last Spring.
She was planned. Meticulously. Even nature was on our side. And I’d say the love started then. I couldn’t see her yet, she had neutral pronouns then, but I could feel them, in my heart, my baby I mean. I knew that they’d bring a sense of tranquility that I hadn’t yet experienced. I could imagine those peaceful times, together, touching. Little toes on my skin. Cookie dough smell.
We planned her meticulously. We watched what we ate, drank, thought and wished for. We wanted them clean and strong. When we knew we had conceived, we relaxed a little. More fuel. More comfort. Still clean. I watched them both grow. They’ve always been beautiful. Both of them.
She was still in the womb and I thought she was “a night baby”. She used to keep my odd hours. I’d see and feel her awake when I was, tumbling, testing the confines of her world. I’d wonder how her mother can sleep though a tiny human trying to forcibly break their way out of her abdomen.
My Love would sleep right though it - she is not a night baby. I loved “my night baby”; just like her Daddy. I made her in the image of myself.
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And then “my night baby” was born, late evening. She arrived, greeted us, fed and promptly fell asleep, pretty much until the morning. “My night baby” was already subverting expectations and still is. She very much views night time as a sleeping time and is certainly not ready to let go of any day naps or even regulate them to any degree of useful predictability.
And I still love her for it. But this love is true.
That “rush of love”, while real love, was ego.
The egotistical love we feel for our children before we (or they) know who they are isn’t a false love. It serves a worthy purpose. The kind of fierce, unconditional protection and championing a child needs to thrive can only come from that kind of selfish, narcissistic love that many of us experience for our children. The kind of love that comes from projected expectations and desires, some of them unfulfilled dreams of our own.
I think that’s what makes us lift up trucks and cross oceans to save our babies. We’re really saving ourselves.
But it isn’t true love. Not yet.
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True love still starts early, and it grows. It can be those first few days, when you realize something that they like. Or don’t like. And you realize that you just learned something about who they really are.
It’s the first time you recognize that they made a choice and fought for it. It’s when your certainty that they’d love something, or hate it, is demonstratably false, and they feel the opposite.
It’s when you could cry through exhaustion, but they still manage to make your day bright.
My love for my daughter is real. And one day, when she knows who she is and also who she wants to be, it will be also 100% true, too.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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Photo credit: Felipe Salgado on Unsplash
