by Carol Wise

Created on: August 17, 2010

Love can often seem an illusive emotion, hard to define and difficult to understand. It has many forms and is easier to understand in some varieties of it than others. I am 53 years old so I have experienced many forms of love and witnessed even more. I lost my mother when I was three years old and my father seemed to push me away, so looking for love, true unconditional love became a quest for me. I never felt I was good enough or that I measured up to what the adults in my world wanted. There always seemed to be some requirement necessary to gain love.

At one point, I thought I would find that when I became a mother. Instead I found I had created an unreal fantasy in my own mind, children through necessity, make demands, that grow as they mature and those demands change and grow. Reality was a wake up call. Babies cry to be fed and changed, they don’t care if you are tired or sick. They need to be cared for around the clock, whether you feel like it or not and as they grow, they develop opinions and additional demands. When they get older they may even find you an embarrassment, due to your age, the way you dress or your size. They love you but it isn’t with out some conditions.

Now I love my children deeply and I have loved a few men in my life time but “my idea of love” was routinely disappointed. I looked around and it seemed to be lacking every where.

Children supposedly conceived in love, pushed aside for new loves, jobs or drugs and alcohol. People who have relationships, out in public calling each other names, degrading each other publicly. Society in general turning a blind eye to the situations of many people, leaving them living in cars or completely homeless. Of course, I could go on listing examples of what I have seen, instead I will just say I became very cynical.

I decided that love was a delusion that we bought into and it must be some kind of illusion. That it did not exist except in our own minds, a bill of goods we sold ourselves, that was consistently left out. It was during this time in my life that I stumbled across the man who would become my husband. We were both weathered and had been beaten by life, he wasn’t perfect and there were plenty of red flags that should have sent me running, the reverse was true of myself as well. I don’t know why he didn’t run but my gut kept telling me to look deeper. Neither of us had a long line of suitors after us, so perhaps we continued to see each other

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