Recently I had the opportunity to hear the Executive Director
of Character Counts speak. He was talking about passion and made the comment
that love was a hard skill. Not a skill that is hard to do but that love is
hard skill, like accounting, finance, engineering – the opposite of a soft
skill. According to the interwebs, a hard skill is acquired and enhanced with training,
repetition and practice (by this definition, scooping ice cream is a hard skill
– if you don’t believe me, you didn’t work for my boss at Baskin Robbins.) And this
just really resonated with me. Maybe because I’m in a season* where I am being
challenged to up my love game**.
These last two years I learned what was love and what love wasn’t.
I had to make some trust falls and hope people caught me, and the important
people did. Some of the people I love the absolute most in this world need me
to be there more than ever but they aren’t making it easy and I’m not my best
self right now either. What I now know for sure is that if you are not
constantly learning how to love and challenging yourself to be better - to love
others better, to love yourself better - then you aren’t growing; you are just
a stagnate pool of weird algae emotions. And nobody likes swampy feels.
My babies are going through one the hardest changes in life
and need me to love them through it. And it can be so hard, so hard. They need
my patience and my grace more than ever. They need me to rise above what I want
to say and take a higher ground that some days is higher than I can reach. My
Squirrel is testing me and I epically fail regularly. I go to bed at night and
review all the ways I messed up and just hope that I can get up and be better
for him the next day. Despite swearing off of parenting books, I am now reading
one on how to help your kids deal with divorce – I wish I had read it sooner
because guess what. He’s textbook – it’s just that his normal right now is challenging
and scary for me. He is asking me to love as he pushes me away, and while it is
easy to say you love everything about a person, the true test is when that
person dares you to love him as he wrestles with his emotions. No matter what, I
get up and stand by him again every morning. I recognize that the single act of
trying again fresh each day is the love he needs right now. He is pushing me
beyond the parent I am and I am growing and loving him better for it. Despite
our battles, he will learn that he can’t get rid of his Mama, no matter how
much he tries.
My Moose loves me and wants to protect me. I see that he
wants to be there for me emotionally and that is so sweet. It comes from a good
place. Easy love is letting him be an adult before he should and using him as a
support system. But I’m still the Mama and that means I’m the one who does the
supporting. The love Moose needs is me being gracious to people that have
wounded me, trying to model rising above and letting him relax and be a kid. What
did Michelle Obama say? When they go low, we go high. It is so much easier to
say than do. Taking the higher road sucks. The oxygen is thinner up here and it
gives me a headache. The high road is asking to hear all about the weekend I
didn’t have with my babies with nothing in my heart but the hope that they had
fun. No jealousy and no judgement. Lord help me. I am only human and sometimes
I am just not proud of what that human heart feels. But loving my babies means that
I have to be a better person than I feel like being for their sake.
Speaking of the Lord…trusting God to have my back requires
me to trust in a love that is faith based – hoping beyond hope that things
really will work out because of this concept of God’s love. It’s not easy,
that’s for sure. It’s downright scary and not natural for me. But I am trying
to accept a love I can’t understand. I am trying to grasp that someone might
love me beyond my faults and have my best interests at heart. I am trying to
understand and accept an unconditional love that does not ask me to be perfect
or to prove myself worthy. So many of my relationships in life have felt like
perfection and hustle were the cover charge. I am not used to asking for help
without giving something in return. I am practicing this thing called praying,
hoping it lands true.
Finally, I am practicing loving myself. Shit this is hard.
For so long if I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t worthy. And if you know me, you know
I am far far far away from being perfect. If I could just hustle harder, be
quiet, take care of all things, then maybe I’d be loved. And what I have
learned is that I sacrificed myself to earn love – that’s a choice I have to
forgive myself for. I have to love myself and that is all that I need. And I
don’t have to be perfect to love myself. Now this isn’t easy. I’ll admit I’ve
been having some more challenging days with this lately and just feeling kind
of down. To kill some time while I was waiting the other day, I was deleting
and filing old emails and I stumbled upon one I wrote to myself. If you
remember back in February, I called it the Love Month and I decided to write
myself a love letter. And there was a whole email in my inbox, written to me,
from me, expressing my love for myself. Holy cow I could not have found that at
a better time. I read it twice that day and I plan to read it at least once a
week because I said some things that I needed to hear. If you can’t love
yourself properly, you can’t expect others to do the same. If I could leave you
with one action item today, it is this – write yourself a love letter, pouring
it all out about what an amazing person you are. You never know when you are
going to need to read it.
Love IS a hard skill. If we are lucky we are constantly
stretched in our capacity to love. One of my favorite sayings is anything worth
doing is hard. And love is worth doing. I believe that when we are given
chances to grow, it means we will be asked to use those skills in the future.
At some point we will be asked to rise up and, if we have been paying
attention, we will have the new life tools necessary to be of service to
someone who needs our help. I have had so many opportunities to improve my love
muscle that my future must be full. I can’t wait.
*Oh my gosh I hate the phrase “season.” And yet, here I use
it. #toomuchtherapy
**The new dating show on CBS coming up this fall. Insert eye
roll here…
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