At some point in your life, there is a moment where you realize the love your parents felt for you. It may be one specific moment when it dawned on you. It could be a culmination of experiences. It might just simply be maturity. Or you may be just entering a phase where you feel you’ve reached a place in your life that is familiar to how you identified them in relation to yourself, specifically as parents. You might suddenly feel taken aback. It could be emotional or simply matter of fact.

For years you heard your parents say they loved you. It was easy to take it for granted and you were fortunate to not question their authenticity and not yet capable of realizing just how powerful and deep that love actually was. It is almost this magical power that is bestowed upon you when you have a baby. It is hard to process, loving this person beyond anything you thought possible. You were likely told how much you would love your child but it was all so hypothetical. Suddenly, those feelings are there and this new person is yours and you realize just how simple life is in those deep and exhausting moments. The depth of those feelings might be fleeting and sometimes easier put aside than putting extensive thought into it but it is there and ready to be processed at the right time.

You realize all those moments when you were difficult as a young person or felt lost that there was someone right there that loved you in the same way, even when they too felt they were struggling in how best to love you. 

We do not always receive the love we need and that may directly affect how we love others as we grow. Naming the emotion might simply be too painful or somehow escapes us when it is so simple. 

In an ideal parenting journey, we receive the love we need and pass that on similarly to our own children. It is ironic when our most basic need is to love and be loved that we all have such different ideas of what love actually is. And further, how we carry the emotions we have felt being loved with us and how that allows us and prevents us to love others. 

It is in the quiet moments when we reflect, that we can think of how we were loved and what we can take and augment so gently to offer the best of ourselves to someone else. There is no greater gift than this. 

I can specifically remember driving one day many years ago and thinking with such gratitude and wonder as I developed an awareness of how much my grandmother loved me. It was many years after my mother had passed and when I was a mother myself. In many ways, she was more of a mother to me and than my mother was. There is great tragedy in this but beauty within it. It wasn’t an emotional moment in the car that day, but one that was encompassing and left me feeling loved and so fortunate to have had that awareness. It is a moment I still look back on with great reverence.

It has given me peace as a mother to know the love I imagine my mom felt for me. The many years I felt pained by conflict we experienced together and then had that compounded by grief. Some weight was lifted as I became a mother myself and was able to recognize the love, understanding and forgiveness that you have for your child. It is certainly not always immediate but it grows and builds and evolves over time. It is never without complication but it always has the power to be great and hugely influential.