In Pursuit of Love

If I spiral down memory lane and look for what I have been yearning since I can remember, I can with much certainty say that it has been about the pursuit of love. I remember how school was not really about interesting subjects but about friendships-making, breaking, mending, loosing and nurturing them. In high school it was about falling in love- preserving it, nurturing it and sustaining it. Through childhood I remember being burnt by unrequited friendships and love. I strived to receive affection, I strived for acceptance and I wanted to be loved. The experience of love like I wanted it, happened through time ofcourse, the fond memories of my parents’ love for me and as I approached my late teens and early twenties my stable friendships and love- they all sustained me. The need for love never ceases though. While I continue to ask for more from those I love, and while I suffer time and again from perceived losses of some form of love or the other, I have recently begun to experience the giving of love brought about by the birth of my daughter.

She smiles spontaneously at nothing, she cries when I don’t notice those other signs she gives me when she’s hungry, she squirms when she’s wet and she has the most hilarious “hands-up” jerk when she is startled by pretty much anything she chooses to be startled by. She sleeps erratically. The other day when we took her for some vitamin D bath under the early morning sun and she was turned around on her tummy, placed on her grammas legs, she was so curious about what was happening she tried to hold her neck up! She carries my heart with her. I tear up with every cry I don’t understand and at every wrong thing I do with her. My heart almost stopped when I took a look at the needle she had to be injected with for her vaccination, and what a quiet baby we had that day! Only the other day she looked at me with her bright wide eyes and smiled a beaming smile making my heart truly stop a beat. She just turned one month! The reality of her being certainly becomes clearer and more profound with the passing of each day. Never have I known a capacity to love so deep than I do now. My love for her has cycled through time, it feels. From being the one receiving it all to being someone who has finally learnt to readily give, my receptacle of love seems full and overflowing.