Forever love

Unconditional Love                                       Artist:  AngeJedudsor    

The first essay to appear here was about an unexpectedly wonderful visit I had last year with my mother, whose mind had been almost completely lost to Alzheimer’s disease.  I wrote several more posts about our relationship, but after her death a few months ago, I decided I was done with examining and analysing the dynamics of our often wary and awkward dance with each other.

Then last week I emailed an old boyfriend to tell him about the bit part he had played in a recent essay about an incident in my  chequered past.  He got a kick out of it, but it was an allusion I had made in the story to my fear of disappointing my mother that caught his attention.   He wrote:               

‘Poetic license aside, my sense was never even of a whiff of disappointment but only of the sheer and absolute delight your mother took in you. I don't recall Rhoda's zest for colour but I do recall her zest for you.’

There are an extraordinary number of motherless children among the writers I follow.  The most thoughtful comments on my struggle to find the right balance with my mother have come from women who, far too young, lost their own mothers.   They have lived what I believe to be the ultimate loss, along with those who were emotionally abandoned, some in ways too terrible to imagine.  I am very lucky not to be one of them, but my friend Brian’s recollection – and  he remembered right –made poignantly clear that I am missing more than I thought now that  my mother has died. 

Motherless children face the loss, among the infinity of other irreplaceable things, of the unassailable, no-matter-who-you-are-or-what-you-do kind of love that is utterly unconditional.  If they are lucky they get it from their fathers or grandparents, but perhaps it is a rarer gift from those hearts.  This is not to suggest that men are not capable of profound, no-holds-barred love, but I believe that many find it hard to communicate such deep feelings clearly and unequivocally. 

Regardless of the difficulties I had in my adult relationship with my mother, she gave me a solid, healthy foundation, and the best part of that was her love, unwavering and independent of whether she liked or approved of what I did.  Without that, I would have been a different person and quite likely a different mother than the already imperfect one I am.  
     
A man I once knew well gave me a view of what it was like to suffer from conditional maternal love.  His mother’s esteem for her family and friends was like the stock market, the joke used to go, up one day and down the next.  We might laugh at mothers portrayed like this in sitcoms and films, but it stops being funny when real children try to make sense of the precariousness of love that is  doled out as a reward, or withheld as punishment. 

For him, an only child, the message he got from his mother’s conditional love was that if he did the right thing, it meant he was a good son and worthy of her love.  But when his decisions were made in his own, or his family’s, best interests, or when she simply didn’t like what he did, all bets were off.  He spent a lifetime trying to navigate the shifting sands of her affection, resisting and resenting the power she wielded.  As a father himself, he sometimes followed her example and was not able to understand, despite his own experience, how painful this was both for him and his children. 

Is unconditional love just for kids?  I think so.  A friend once told me that her love for her husband was conditional, and considering the warmth of her heart, this admission took me aback.  But lovers, best friends, husbands and wives all have the potential to trespass the limits of love; estrangement and divorce are the sad detritus of once-strong attachments.    To love someone despite anything they might do, say or become takes the unthinking, unblinking parental love that every child deserves. 

It seems appropriate that it’s finally on Valentine’s Day that I can finish this essay, which I dedicate to my mother, Rhoda Josephine Goba, formerly Sudul, nee Grasswick, who made sure I knew how much she loved me.  Whatever other regrets shadow my memories of her, I believe this much: I have honoured her by passing on her gift to my children.  If  they frequently seem to take my unconditional love for granted, it only means I got it right.