Musings I suspect not often proffered by the male of the species. And if that is true, I think it’s sad on a number of fronts. As I sat today watching the Tigers, I glanced at the pictures of my boys over the fireplace and the wheels started turning in this slightly beyond middle aged head. I thought of how proud I am of the three of them and the men and fathers they have become while I have watched and worried over them. I have loved them dearly all their lives and I will till I pass over to the Golden Shore and even from above, my love will be with them. As I looked at their young faces on that wall (these are their senior pictures I was looking at), I remembered that someone once told Laurie and me that we could not possibly love our three children as much as they loved their only child because we had three children and therefore we had to divide our love three ways while all their love was lavished upon the single child so it was a deeper love. I remembering wondering what planet this person came from – if he was from this planet, he surely would know that God gives us the capability to love boundlessly and surely does not intend for us to divide and thus lessen the amount of love we have to give our children - and feeling more than a little sorry for him. To us, our love was not meant to be, and is not, divided. It was meant to be, and is, multiplied by three. To me it is multiplied exponentially, by a factor of three – cubed, if you will. That cubed love is spread equally among the three, no one child is loved more than another, or differently than another. One of the greatest things about our three sons is that they are in so many ways different from one another – different interests, friends, jobs, views on life, wants and needs and we get to love all those differences, hence the exponential multiplication of the love. There are no conditions placed upon that love – it is theirs, free and clear, forever and always. And now that the children are grown with children of their own, we get to benefit from another layer of that multiple of love with our five grandchildren (love to the fifth power). This love is not without its trials, though. It has a flip side to its goodness. When our children hurt (sometimes more than one of them at a time), we hurt, when they struggle, we struggle, when they ail, we ail. And that added layer of love with the grandkids makes it really hard at times because when the grandkids hurt, struggle or ail, we not only feel the hurt and pain they feel, we feel the hurt and pain their parents feel for them. So we get a sort of double whammy! Even given the double whammies, I’ll take the exponentialized(?) version of love over the divisible version always!
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 07:12:46 +0000
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