It was two in the afternoon and I had been awake since four this morning. I had planned on going to the mall, hoping to find a new pair of baby-pink high tops, to celebrate the coming of spring and my second child. Alas, this was not where I ended up.
I am now positioned in a hospital bed, propped up, red faced and screaming, for what seems like an audience of hundreds. At some point in this scenario of pain, anticipation, and exertion, my brain went back to the idea of shoe shopping. It occurred to me that I already owned four other pairs of high tops. How would they feel if I brought home another, newer, pinker pair? Would they feel as though I didn’t love them anymore? Would they worry that I would no longer find them attractive, or fun, or useful? Some would argue, that of course they would do no such thing, they were inanimate objects that were made to be used.
My mind scurries around thinking about shoes and love and oh yes, pushing! My husband is currently letting me squeeze all the blood out of his right hand, while I wonder why so many people think that love is a finite substance. What would my delivery room audience think, if I suddenly ripped off the tangle of cords and sticky pads currently attached to me and the variety of machines that go ‘ping,’ and declared that I could not possibly love this second child, because I already had one? Would they cast it off as labor induced hysteria? The fact is, that I did have another child, a son whom I loved so much it sometimes hurt. How would my first born feel when we brought home this newer, pinker, baby? Would he feel abandoned? Replaced? Unloved?
Parents understand that love is not finite, that it does not run out when you give it to more than one person at a time. One of the many joys and lessons of having children is learning about the realities of love; discovering the infiniteness of affection. We know that the more you give, the more you get. If love was a limited, finite commodity to be stored away, saved for a special occasion, a singular person, or one thing, we could only ever have one pair of shoes, one child, one intimate partner at a time. We can have more than one pair of shoes; and families of all types have successfully raised and loved multiple well-balanced children, since time immemorial.
So, why is it that we cannot imagine the possibility of loving more than one intimate partner? Parents manage to show love to more than one child, friends to more than one friend. Why then are intimate relationships excluded from this paradigm? Why do we believe that we can have and love, only one significant other at a time? Society designed the boundaries of monogamy. But most of us understand that love knows no boundaries. Isn’t it time to open our minds to the possibilities that our hearts already welcome?