More than love

Is love ever stranded?

The recent trial of Casey Anthony created a brand-new parenting conundrum: How many weeks should pass before you face the realization your 2 year old just isn’t coming home? During the investigation into your missing child, are you justified in lying to the police? Finally, are the tatoos on Tommy Lee more obscure than the parental neglect of Casey Anthony?

Parents do for their children, out of love. While it can be a singular gesture, it is always interactive. Love is never an oasis.

When thay are young, we love, nurture and protect our children. This same love sends them out into the world to face all of it’s challenges, and danger, when they get older.

Protection – like a credit card – has it’s limits. Despite the fancy newfangled pop-psych phraseology, overprotection isn’t loving too much, it is protecting the wrong thing. As parents, we need to protect our children from danger. When they get older, we need to protect them from reliance upon us.

If this is supposed to be easy, let me know. I must have missed the single-cell stage and went straight to the multiplex cinematic version in 3d with magic fingers and sensurround.

As a word, love never sits there. You can look at it, roll your eyes, and view it like a bed of moss: far too soft for stable travel. Conversely, your eyes might well up. Then it is you who is too mushy for travel.

Many say God is love. There is nothing in the natural world which would negate this. Since love cannot ever be stranded, we are an extension of God’s love. The first law of Thermodynamics is merely love interacting with science. Big-Bang Evolution claims existance sparked life. What else could it be?

Love needs embrace.

In order to have a beginning, something needs to begin spinning upon an axis, if only in the cosmos. It needs to move, live, breathe… love. Dogs can’t do science, but they must love. Dog owners feel what non-owners can’t begin to comprehend. You can never give to your dog what the dog gives to you, unconditionally. When ‘Spot’ starts putting spots on the carpet, we say, “What did you do?” We watch with amusement as the canine ears recede, the head goes down, and they shamefully acknowledge our displeasure.

At the end of a repulsive day, our dog never greets us saying, “What did you do?”

Unconditional love is boundless, even when it bounds towards our pristine fibers at the end of our less than pristine day.

Unconditional love is the lesson of parenting. My daughter just squeaked past her 11th Birthday. There is nothing she can do which would make me stop loving her. At times I wish she wasn’t aware of this, for me thinketh she takes advantage herewith.