I Love You More

I have one child who was born wanting to be perfect.  She did everything the way babies are supposed to do.  She latched on immediately and made me think breastfeeding was easy.  She slept through the night and made me think I was the wisest mother in the world.  She walked early, and talked early, and potty trained early.  She was fiercely independent by the age of two and refused to let me pick out her clothes, hairstyle, or shoes from that point on.  We have toed the line in battle about one issue or another for along as she has understood the word “No.”  In many ways she has been seeing herself in my eyes as I have seen myself in her eyes since the moment she first landed in my arms.  In her I see myself as a girl with the same determination, the same independence, the same seriousness, the same anxieties, the same insecurities, always trying to earn love.

I have another child who was born already thinking he was perfect.  He loved people and accepted that people loved him.  If he saw you, he smiled and then you smiled and then everyone smiled.  He is tenderhearted and can get his feelings hurt in a heartbeat.  When that happens he needs my hugs and kisses and I am his soft place to fall.  But just as quickly he is up and running off again, smiling and laughing and talking.  He moves through the world as if it is his playground and everyone loves him because why wouldn’t they? When he came home from his first day of kindergarten I asked him if he had made any new friends and he said incredulously, “No. I’m already friends with everybody, Mom.”  I am perpetually perplexed by this little fireball of a boy and how he lives life in such a self-assured and fearless way.  For him, love isn’t earned.  It’s expected.

And then there is the third child.  The one I love but haven't even met.  The one who will need to be taught over and over again that love does not end, love never fails, and love will make us belong to him forever.  Our love story is waiting to begin.

Be fair.  Be even.  Don’t play favorites.

This is the cardinal rule of good parenting.

Or is it?

I have heard my sweet baby girl complain time and time again that her brother gets away with too much.  We take his side more than hers.  We punish her first.  We don’t see how much he torments her behind our backs.  He gets away with EVERYTHING.  We love him more.

Time and time again I have tried to make her see how this simply is not true.  We don’t have favorites.  We do punish them both.  We do make him leave her alone.  We don’t take sides.  We love the same.

And then one day I heard her say the same thing about her friends.  They don’t want to play with me.  They don’t want to be my friend.  She picked her to be a science partner, not me.   She had a sleep over and didn’t ask me.  She likes her more.

Somehow, somewhere, for some reason, my beautiful and brilliant daughter believes what most girls eventually accept about themselves.  She’s not good enough.  She’s not pretty enough.  She’s not smart enough.  She’s not athletic enough.  She isn’t enough.

I realized that I wasn’t ever going to make her think that I loved her the same as her brother.  If I keep aiming for fair, she will always see unfair.  I have to convince her that I love her more.  In order for her to get past fair, she has to believe she’s the special one.  (The flip side is that my son will probably always believe that he is the favorite.  That’s just how he is wired to see things.)

This is my new philosophy of mothering: when two children have different hearts and different ways of seeing themselves in the world, fair is not what they need.  They need ALL the love you have to give.  They need to be convinced that the fullness of their parent’s love is there for them no matter what.

Then I realized that this is exactly how God loves us.

Story after story in the Bible tells us this truth.  Jesus told those parables for a reason and one reason was to stop getting people to think of God’s love as a commodity that can be earned and equally divided like a big love pie in the sky.  In the story about the prodigal son, the older brother has a point.  His brother squanders his inheritance and then returns and is welcomed back as if nothing has happened! This isn’t fair and deep down we all agree with him in some way. The younger brother had his piece of the pie and he threw it away so why should he come back and take what belonged to the oldest son all along?

God’s love is not the same for you or me.  God’s love isn’t even very fair.  God loves us the way we need to be loved. God loves us when we need to be loved.  God meets us where we are and showers love upon us.  God lavishes us all with love but some of us need more lavishing than others.  Some of us have been broken more than others.  Some of us have had our hearts battered and bruised to the point that we don’t even recognize true love when we see it.  “My grace is sufficient for you” means just that.  God’s grace is just what you need.  Not your predetermined allotment of grace.  Not your evenly distributed share of grace.  Enough grace for you.  Enough for you.  Enough for me.  Enough.

I checked my daughter out from school for a doctor’s appointment today and told her that she needed to keep it a secret, but we were stopping for lunch and a manicure on the way.  “Don’t tell your brother. This is just for us.”  The look on her face said it all and I have decided that she needs to hear more “Don’t tell your brother” and less “I love you both the same.”  Instead of trying to convince them that my love is equal, I want each one of them to think they are loved the most.  My love will never be enough, but maybe it will point them towards the one whose love is overwhelming, can never be earned, is never fair, but is always enough.