Hot Take: Unconditional love IS conditional

(Life is simpler when you’re alone- just focused on your children)

Hot Take: Unconditional love IS conditional.

If you look at this Papa I’ve been writing about this week - born like a backwards Cinderelly at a pumpkin patch without a godmother - also know what I so very rarely tell anyone:

This is not a person who hasn’t been rejected, pushed, and then pushed away again.

He has by all 3 women in his life… but mostly, a solid strong willed 2 of the Pickwick Club.

If in doubt, I don’t want a Laurie, I don’t want a professor, I don’t even want an origin source of the Pickwick Papers to give a Dickens-damn…. I just want safety.

And safety, to me, for a long time, meant simplicity.

Life is simpler when you’re alone- just focused on your children. No compromise. No one to challenge you. No one to hold you accountable. But you eventually have to learn to stop hurting and pushing at love… because love isn’t actually a human right, ever.

It should be.

But it isn’t. It comes with giving it too.

Unconditional love IS conditional: and it’s taken me a near lifetime to learn that. Love without conditions is never going to be safe. It’s not noble, like I once thought, or a martyr shield to wear like a Domrémy peasant, marching into battle for France and faith; Top to armor.

Love has to be shared to be love.

But ours? Ours, and his with the girls, and mine with the girls, and ours with ourselves has - at many times - been hell. And that’s important to be said bluntly.

It’s not been carriages riding off into the sunset. Nor easy days of cozy parenting and sweaters. Nor success after success. But I can tell you one thing I’ve realized recently, as we approach the same autumnal time in which my partner first began to become a Papa, and it’s what I kept repeating to him:

“I’m sorry for all that’s happened to your life since we met.”

“I’ve been able to fall in love,” he responded that night, after we got home from a day of both highs and lowest-lows and I said this apology, pillow to pillow: “I’ve been able to fully raise 2 girls - regardless of what in life has transpired. I’ve been able to experience so much life with you.”

“Unlike you,” he said, referring to my constant chastising of myself for taking a pause from our company - no matter how needed (and possibly even ‘earned’) that was at that time: “I’m proud forever that we have memories of a 60-something person company that changed lives, trajectories of students, shifted minds.”

To some, it might be weird to think we’ve been featured on more than one TV show. Worked (and are working, present tense) on and off in film, and with different projects. (Always sneaky aces up the sleeve). Have been in special publications, favorite stages, beyond… but that reads like a resume more than a real life.

So I kind of don’t care.

That’s not the show of a good show. The standing O. It’s just critic reviews from those not under the gobos to begin with.

Those credits don’t make me look across the bed at a person whose entire life changed some 12 years ago when he met us…

And not feel…

Guilty.

PART TWO. (Part One)

More tomorrow!