A Kids Concept

by Mac Eaton

Looking at my mom and dad, smiling at each other in the kitchen with an immense and infatuated look in both their eyes, I smiled too. I didn’t quite understand what the look meant, or the history it shared. I was five. But I felt the happiness radiating from them. I could see the love in their embrace. So I decided to ask my father.

“Daddy, do you love mommy?”

He looked at me with a goofy, yet perplexed stare, “Of course I do kiddo.”

I looked up at him innocently,

“Have you ever loved anyone else?”

Pursing his lips, my father sat and thought. Finally, he answered, “I love you. And your sister. And our family. But I don’t think I’ve ever really loved anyone else. At least, I’ve never told anyone besides your mom that I loved her.”

Mesmerized by my parents' relationship, my blue eyes widened in bliss: “So you’ve only said I love you to mommy?”

“Yeah,’ he answered, ‘even some family I’ve never told I love them.”

“What?’ I asked, shocked, ‘Why not?”

“Well, if I don’t feel it, why would I say it? That word is reserved for the people I truly love.” My father tilted his chin and smiled down at me. I was taking it all in, and he knew that. But I brushed off my slight confusion and shot a toothy smile back at him.

“I love you daddy!” I cried as I launched myself towards his leg to hug him.

“I love you too, kiddo.”

From that conversation on, I rationed the word love very sparingly. I told my parents and sister everyday that I loved them. But, when friends would say it to me, and I went to say it back, I couldn't. I tripped over my own tongue and the word refused to come out. People on Instagram would comment ‘ILY!!’ on my feed, but all I would ever type back was a heart. The first boy to ever tell me he loved me knew I wouldn’t say it back; just saying the word around him felt wrong.

Love, in my mind, became unattainable. Love became an impossible standard. The concept was born in my head when I was untouched by the privation of life. It was born when, as a child, I believed my parents' love was the epitome of all that is good in the world; a rapturous idea that feels nothing short of ecstasy.

But this skewed perception of love that I had subsumed made it impossible to find love for myself. And now life has become a journey, to redefine love, and this time, with pragmatic standards.