Love is a mother. She has lost her first two kids in a custody battle, and every man she’s had a child with has betrayed her in some way. Love is finding new lives in different people and trying to settle for the first time in her life. And love fails. She finds a man she thinks is going to change her life. Love gets married again, after telling herself it was never going to happen again; her children were going to change the trajectory of her family line if it was the last thing she did. But the man she marries becomes something short of a monster, and love doesn’t stop him; she doesn’t know how. Love doesn’t know how to be a mother, and she certainly doesn’t know how to be a savior either. Love becomes a tormentor, because that’s all she knows. Her hurt becomes her daughter’s hurt. But she’s not evil; she was once a daughter too.

Love is a daughter. She doesn’t feel very loved, but she keeps on anyway. Love has a  mother, who she hardly knows. Love really raised herself, although technically her mother was around. Love realizes, though, that there’s a difference between a mother and a mom, and although she had a mother she never had a mom. Love flinches when her professor raises a pencil next to her and she cries at OBGYN appointments. Love writes to erase the pain (but she writes in pen so it’s never actually erasable) and pretends like she doesn’t miss her mother. She lets the longing for the relationship she could’ve had with her mother eat her away from the inside, out.

Love is a mom, who’s always wanted to foster a child. Love invites a homeless teenager into her home and claims her forever; love gets attached. Love tries to make up the decade of life she never saw but love doesn’t know how to raise a teenager. Love has two biological kids, but love is raising toddlers. Suddenly, love is raising a senior in high school, who for her entire life was forced to grow up and refuses help. Love doesn’t know what to do; love and her new daughter fight because they have just met and they don’t know each other. When love hears the teenager talk about her childhood, she reminisces over what could have been–what she could’ve done if she was around. Love is a teacher, who taught her teenager’s older sister years before. Love knows what this family is like, and she invites her teenager into her home anyway. She takes a risk for the first time, and the teenager often wonders if she regrets it. But love perseveres. Love holds on to her teenager as much as she can; sometimes her teenager wishes she wouldn’t grasp on so much but she likes to pretend that she doesn’t miss her so much that sometimes it makes her physically ill. Maybe love feels the same, but neither of them will ever really talk about it.

Love is a girl. She’s a daughter and a friend, but she’s a girl above all else. She runs through fields of flowers and sneezes at the pollen. She insists on petting dogs every time they walk past. She likes to dress up and put bows in her hair like a princess, because she never got to dress up as a child. She misses her cat more than anything else in the world. She loves her femininity and protects it with her entire heart, because if she wasn’t a girl she doesn’t know what else she’d be. Perhaps a writer, perhaps a student or maybe a friend. But she loves to be alive and simply be, and there’d be none of the simplicities of enjoying life if she wasn’t a girl. That’s all she’s ever known. That’s the only thing in her life that’s ever been in her control. No matter what those people did to her they could never take away her womanhood. They could take her youth, her self-love, and even sometimes her will to live, but they could never take her girlhood. Love is a girl. And being a girl is the first time she’d ever actually known what it was like to love fully. She loved being a little girl and putting on fake makeup. When she was touched in ways that her elementary school teachers told her was wrong, she tried to cope by “being the man,” but she has coped the most by embracing her girlhood. Love loves, and she does it as hard as she can. Love loves being a girl, she loves being alive, and mostly she loves being human. She loves being human more than anything else; it is that foundation that keeps her alive. 

Love is universal and it persists always. Love is a mother, a daughter, a friend. Love is a student and a father. Sometimes, love is just human. But love is everywhere and always will be. Love hurts. Love lives.

where there is love there is life.

gandhi