Super Healthy Love
Loving a baby is like being in an incredibly red-flag relationship but being so in love that you refuse to see any of it as a bad thing.
This alleged person deigns to wake me up at all hours of the night demanding my attention. He throws things at me during the day if I don’t give him attention fast enough, but unfortunately for him I am literally speed personified and can duck every time. Of course, this only makes him laugh like the psychopath he is. Then he pulls my hair just to see what I’ll do. I give him no response because I don’t want him to think it hurts, and this also makes him laugh. He has no concept of personal space or my time, and intrudes on both with abandon and glee.
And yet I am in love with him. No one told me about the endlessly beautiful story of falling in love with your children. Every time The Baby finds something he likes, he makes a face that is now etched on my heart, and I silently promise to help him spend the rest of his life finding things he likes. Every love song is now about the deep and abiding love one can have for a child, except the song Smack That by Akon where he tries to come up with words for not being disrespectful to a woman and settles on ‘sexy bitch.’
That one is not about loving your child.
But the rest of them are transcendent in the way they speak to me. I do see his face in every flower. I walk on clouds because I am in love. Despite his desire to emulate a drunk hobo who has lost the ability to speak due to his excessive drunkenness and also lost the ability to not pee his pants, I love him.
It is also such a fascinating thing to know, truly know, that this other person will never love you as much as you love them. How could they? American love stories insist on never being the sucker, that being the One Who Loves The Other More is the weaker position and a bad thing. But I don’t feel like the sucker here. I feel like I won. To know a depth of love that can never really be returned borders on the divine.
It is the fourth of July and I have penned this while Likely confuses herself by farting. She doesn’t care about rampant fireworks going off, but a singular fart has sent her into a tailspin trying to figure out what just happened to her butt. As ever, she has no care for the depth of my emotions, which is why I had to have this baby to get over the actual abusive relationship in this house, which is the one I have with my dog (who is secretly an alcoholic I am sure of it).