Is There Love Enough for Me?

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Remember how you experienced this day in childhood? My own childhood was, perhaps, longer ago that some of yours, so my experience may be different from yours. In my middle class elementary school, each child decorated a shoe box with tissue and construction paper hearts in red, pink, lavender and white, adding touches of lace-like paper doilies, if we were lucky enough to have some.Through a slot in the box's lid, our classmates dropped small white envelopes containing their offerings of love and friendship. Inside each envelope, an image of a cowboy, princess, space ranger or ballerina asked, "Will you be my valentine?"

Back then, teachers did not require that every child give a valentine to every other child, as I believe most do today. Perhaps adults in the late 1950s and early 60s were not so concerned that a child's self-esteem is fragile and must be protected from all negative experience. What I remember is that there was always a moment of noticing that some child in my class had not given me a valentine. There was that momentary heartache of thinking, "S/he doesn't like me."

Moments like this were just one source of confirmation of a "Truth" I thought I knew: there is not enough love for me to have my share. What was your childhood belief about love and its availability to you? What is your belief today? Is there love enough for you?

The Childhood Treasure of Independence calls to me on this day after Valentine's Day, to share what it knows of love's availability. I've decided to give Independence its voice today and hope you enjoy this interview....

What Babies Know

This week, I was blessed by the opportunity to hold a young infant. I always love that first sensation of fragility, as a parent or grandparent transfers into my arms that precious little miracle who has only recently entered the world. How do they let go?

Then the tiny sensory bundle that is a baby is there; back curving along the inside of my arm, bobbing head cradled in my palm. The complex scent that is a newborn creates a little bubble around the two of us. I am swept into the voice of this new child, learning about him or her as I smell freshly washed skin and hair, or a diaper that needs changing, or stale cigarette smoke. I feel the way he moves in my arms and I hear they way she "speaks," making long vowel sounds or strings of little "eh-eh-eh-eh" sounds. At the same time, my eyes take in hair and skin, movement, and facial expressions, and I learn more about this babe.

This is how babies experience us: pure sensory input (but without all the language to describe it as I have). For a newborn, each of us adults is nothing but a single sensory image. Everything about us that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt with the skin/body, streams into the infant like threads onto a hi-speed loom. In the shortest space of time imaginable -- SNAP! -- like that, but a million times faster -- those individual sensory threads are braided together into a whole. You, the adult holding the baby, are a sensory experience for Baby but you don't yet have a name.

This way of apprehending reality is the rich vein of ore from which this little being can mine the Childhood Treasure of Trust, if we adults know how to help.