Mother love

 

My mother loved me. That is a central fact of my life and, I hope, of yours: a parent's love, perhaps even two. 

My mother was also a source of great irritation to me. I love my children. I am also a source of great irritation to them. Irritation is an inevitable side effect of being close--we are none of us perfectly smooth. But the irritation a child feels toward a parent is, I think, often a direct product of the parent's love, of having someone else care as much or even more than you yourself do about your successes and your failures, about your actions and decisions, about your hurts and healing. It is deeply intrusive, thus, again, irritating.

Irritation demands a response. Many children respond to the irritation of a parent's love by taking space from it, or trying to. It is part of what makes the teen years so fractious: the desire to take space is there, the ability to do so is limited. Later, we move, leaving our parents behind with their love. But absence, they say, only makes the heart grow fonder. A terrifying thought.

I left my mother and now, many decades later, she has left me. Still, my mother loved me, and that fact remains.