Love Unravelled? Love's Unravelling Me!

My darlings, I have been having a bad week. Not cataclysm bad. Perturbation bad. 4am angst and mild diarrhoea bad. The bad that is born of love, and of tolerating living with this affliction.

Love is a big word, for such a little pattern of letters, and I am lucky to use it a lot. And I mean a lot. I am prone to negativity, this is undeniable, but even at my worst, I am tethered by it, and I throw it about like “sorry” in an unexpectedly busy British corridor. I tell my children I love them more or less one thousand times per day, my partner must content himself with only a handful, and it is the terminating phrase of any exchange with my parents or brother. I “love” snowdrops, and the smell of rain, the view of the fells and the sweet crumble of halva on my tongue. I “love” reading beautiful prose, and an unexpected Meatloaf song on the radio being unabashedly overblown. I “love” that Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Martin McDonagh are together, just imagining the little script babies, and I “love” the idea that all over the world we are cross pollinating one another’s universes by means of artistic expression. I love flowers, and trees, and the way the frost forms on the edge of leaves, and I love the way the instrumentation kicks in firm and deep in Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. And I love my people.

I do a lot of loving, of a lot of different sorts.

In fact, bad week or no, I am feeling better just WRITING about the things I love. Perhaps I should stop here.

But this proves to be precisely my point. Love does not stop with the gut tingling good stuff. Here’s the thing. Firstly, love is not enough. Let’s not romanticise love here. Yes, love can be all consuming, it can be passionate, it can be a soaring on the wings of jubilation, but despite all of that, it is not, on its own, enough. Love is not all you need, Tommy and Gina can’t live on a prayer, and I need more than the air that I breathe and to love you. And so love is sometimes not enough. Last week, my parents decided, with many tears, that they must rehome the dog. Now, to give a spoiler, the arrangement fell through, and as if a sign from the fates was bestowed upon us, the dog rehoming concept is now under review. Indeed she will shortly be coming to stay with me for two weeks. You see, I don’t even live with this dog. She is more like my granddog. And I love her. And I don’t actually want to look after her for two weeks. Both/and. Because love is not enough to overcome the overwhelm my neurodiverse children experience sharing space with a muddy adolescent Irish Wolfhound. Love is not enough to imbue our resident cats with calm, or to create extra time in the day to meet everyone’s needs. Love cannot outcompete the grind of concrete necessity. Love is just not as powerful as it feels like it should be. And it does feel like it should be.

Love simmers inside us, filling the cavities of our body like an inexhaustible spring bubbling from deep underground. Mineral rich and aeriated, at its best, it nourishes not only us, but others who come to drink the waters too. But at its worst it can scald us, freeze us, or swamp us altogether. Like water sculpting mountains, its power in our lives is undeniable. But love is not omnipotent. At the same time as my parents decided to rehome the dog, my son fell sick. Let me straight away offer another spoiler – he is, we believe, ok now. But we still smart from a scare a good few years back now, and when we can’t bring his fever down for five, six, seven days, we start to fret a little. Fret, and bubble, like turning the tap up on that spring. If I can love hard enough, we tell ourselves, then all will be well. It’s part of the story after all – if I exercise hard enough, I can run a marathon, if I study hard enough, I can pass any exam, if I work hard enough, I can get what I want. It offers a comforting sense of control, doesn’t it? If I love hard enough, if something can feel THIS potent, stretch my skin THIS tight, swell my heart THIS far, then surely, SURELY it’s power can trump all ills? But it can’t.

Now, my boy is recovering, blood tests normal, colour returned, and I sit on the precipice of letting him fly away from me. Or trundle. In less than three hours, he will board a coach with a troop of other school boys to drive the 1000 miles from our home to Italy, for a week of skiing. And I am grossly, woefully unprepared. That umbilical cord which 14 years ago was snipped so unceremoniously on my kitchen floor five foot from where I sit now, is making its phantom presence known. Today, I largely want to cry. I feel sick. I feel anxious, and paralysed and frantic and fractious and at the same time, I very much want him to go. Here, I believe, is the uncelebrated side of love.

It is easy to lend lyrical flourish to those pangs of love which we can hope to gratify, and it is charming to render love in the softly focused relief of coming into a sense of home. It is dull to talk about forbearance in the face of imperfection and tolerance of discomfort. It is frustrating to write about impotence and competing needs. But this week, this is how I have experienced love. As loss I must reconcile myself to; as worry I must carry as I go about hanging laundry and attending meetings and smiling and never fully not thinking about it; as powerlessness that I must hold alongside my efforts to make it all work like the serenity prayer in action; as anguish that I must swallow to allow those I love to flourish.

Love, so often, is not an unending montage of rapture. It is tolerance of pain. And I welcome that pain. Tomorrow, I have an “urgent” appointment at the breast clinic. I have no spoiler to offer yet, on this one, and I hope that I am fine, but it is always stark, under those hospital lights, how fortunate I am that the aches and pains of love are mine in such abundance. Tonight, I will lie awake and wonder how that coach is progressing across Europe, and will feel it in churn and tug in my gut, and I will worry for my daughter, disorientated by the absence of her brother, and I will feel it tight in my throat. I will imagine the gentle heart of the dog broken and confused, and I will feel it sting the back of my eyes, and I will feel the rough hand of my partner against my skin as he sleeps and I will feel grateful for every one of those pains, because every one marks a connection that matters to me, that tethers me in this world, and it is in those connections, that we find meaning.

As a post script, almost, this week has also been marred by my neighbour felling a fifty foot sycamore on the boundary between our back gardens. This act has floored me, incensed me and devastated me in turns. I loved that tree. It is not easy to pin down what love is, what is legitimate or valid love, and where perhaps a more nuanced phrasing might be appropriate. I would argue it is irrelevant. I loved that tree. It, too, was a point of connection to something that matters to me, just like the sweet crumble of halva on my tongue connects me to my living senses, and the instrumentation surging unflinchingly forward in under Nina’s voice connects me to my membership of a humanity so vast and saturated with adventures.

I have had a bad week, and I am feeling battered and worn, and keenly aware of how abundant my wellspring of love is.