Can I get a sense of belonging from my children? Do I have a sense of belonging when I’m with them? Am I even allowed to think like this or is it putting too much pressure on my girls? Do I have an expectation that belonging should only come from my peers or adults?
It’s a complicated question because there are so many emotions spider webbing their way between me and my children. The question is almost too deep and too close for me to have access to an answer.
”To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Certainly I get buckets of love — an aching vulnerable agonizing love that’s different to the love I feel for my husband, say, or intimate friends, or my parents. This love is all-encompassing because when I look at them, I see the babies they were, the toddlers, our inseparable histories, in every movement and expression. I don’t just see love, I see years and worlds of love. Love is too small a word to describe my feelings, as any parent knows.
But my unconscious mind must have been working away while I was doing other things. Because at that moment as I walked from one room to another, while my children were at school and the house was peaceful, I felt a strong sense of belonging to, and with, my six-and eight-year old daughters.
Is it because they give my life dimensions of meaning I had not anticipated? Or was I simply and selfishly captivated by the warmth of silence devoid of bickering?
Or is it that when I am with them and even when I am not with them I know that I am accepted with all my flaws, loved unconditionally and abundantly, and maybe even appreciated for my differences?
This may be fleeting, this moment full and round with belonging and love, but I have had it. And it is an unexpected pathway I can search out again.I will tuck it away in my box of kisses from my six-year-old and at the same time I send it out to the world to ponder.Acceptance, love, difference, truth.These are the grounding, binding floors of belonging.