The challenge of finding unconditional love

To choose to have children is to accept the challenge of finding, within yourself, unconditional love.  It is the challenge of accepting into your heart someone who could be anyone.  It is the challenge of loving fully someone you could lose.  Your children may come easily and quickly, or unexpectedly, or slowly and painfully and when they arrive who knows who they will be?  Boy or girl?  Healthy or not? Like you or different?  Content or emotional? Easy or rebellious?  And who knows what kind of person that child will grow into? In a strange way, if you can learn to open your heart to your children, you’ve opened your heart to everyone.  Even yourself…

It is natural to have preferences, anxieties or dreams for your children’s future. Naturally, you want the best for your children and naturally you’ve got your own ideas about what the best might be.  It is also only natural to not want to suffer yourself.  And yet, the core task of parenting, should you accept it, is to open your heart to all of that, to treat yourself gently with all of that, and to open your heart fully, recklessly and without condition to your child.  This doesn’t mean that you won’t have your own preferences and opinions and it certainly doesn’t mean that there won’t be times when you feel angry, sad or stressed.  In fact, it means opening your heart to all of that, to all of your reactions to your child, and opening your heart to your child too.  It means choosing to love someone who could become anyone.  It means choosing to love knowing that there will be times when it hurts.  It means loving anyway. 

Apply it to your life:  Can you choose to love your child unconditionally?  To hold gently your preferences and worries, the awareness of what you might lose, and to love anyway?