What Is Unconditional Love?
I was telling a friend a story from my childhood; and that despite being about 6 years old when it happened, I still remember it vividly today ~46 years later.
I was in the basement of our house with my collection of precious matchbox cars. I used to save up money from taking out the trash (a dime) and cleaning dishes (a whole quarter) to buy these, always looking for one that looked more sleek than the next. I was looking for aerodynamics although I didn’t know the word at the time. Because I had invented the most perfect game of all time.
With each new car I would test it across our entirely tiled basement floor. It was, for a 6 year old, a long stretch from one end where the tile started to the other end — where awaited a great fiery wall of doom if my car were to happen to touch it even in the slightest. So the game went like this; I would take each car and push it as hard as I could to get it as close to the wall as I could without touching the wall. If the car hit the wall it was game over and I’d have to go outside and battle a dragon with a stick or something like that, but no more matchbox racing for the rest of the day!
One day after work my Mom joined me in the basement, zipping cars across that ugly tile with me. I disctinctly remember her in her business suit. She had not changed because she went straight to me. She wanted to spend time with me after a hard day work.
We slid cars joyfully one after the other each laughing and smiling. But I had this nagging suspicion something wasn’t the same. Something different was going on. Finally it dawned on me: My mom didn’t get joy from playing the game. She got joy from the game because she was with me.
She could have gone to her room, changed, and sat on a reclining chair and relaxed. She could have gone to the neighbors and debriefed about the stresses of each others’ day. She could have read a book or done a million other things. Racing a tiny car in a dank basement across a cold floor in a horrifically 1960’s half completed basement was probably the last thing she wanted to do. Except that it was with me. So that’s what she did.
How does this picture at the top relate to this story? I was shy as a young child and used to sneak outside away from people a bunch and look up at the star. Doing this is such a formative memory it makes up the first chapter of my next book coming out — all the things I would think about. But my subconscious mind was doing thinking of its, unbeknownst to me. It was thinking, unfairly of course but that’s what so often happens in your subconscious, that my parents might not love me. That maybe off in one of those stars was a place where true love existed. This kind of though processing is probably why I have watched the movie Interstellar about 25 times — it’s theme is loosely centered around having to leave earth to find the permanence of love.
I was beat up a good deal as a child and my parents both worked. Both left and came home in their business suits. When I would be beat up my subconscious mind would always ask and conclude: “where are your parents to protect you, if they left you and are not here that must mean you are not capable of being loved.” This is why I am a huge proponent of therapy. Do you think I’d have ever figured that out on my own? I can assure I would not have.
Of course they both loved me. Going to work each day for our family is proof enough. But amazingly, they each found time (for my dad it was most often throwing the baseball with me) to spend with me after work. When resting and decompressing would have been by far the most alluring option.
And that is what unconditional love is. People like to phrase it as meaning we love others without conditions but that’s wrong. Of course there are conditions — one from the story above being that I was my parent’s child. There weren’t doing this with neighbors down the street. There’s a quote that says “courage is when you are afraid, but you go anyway.”
Unconditional love, then, is when you could be doing anything else on the planet, but you spend time with the person you love anyway. I hope you have that kind of love like I have had my entire life, and find the proof that I did.
Mike Spivey
We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.
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