Here’s a question that comes up fairly often. It’s a question I’ve asked, and been asked, more times than I like to count:
How do you love someone deeply when you’ve never been loved that way yourself?Or – rephrase it – how do you mentor someone else when no one’s ever mentored you?
Or – how do you set wise boundaries, when no one did that for you?
Or – how do you invest in others, when you’re not sure of the investment in yourself?
As a young mother, this really worried me. I remember holding a new, very loud baby, and wondering if it would be possible to love her. I did love her, on some simple, elemental level, but I also knew if she cried too long, too loud, too late into the night, there was part of me that would gladly hand her back.
Maybe that was closer to the surface for me than for most: my own parents couldn’t handle the challenge of parenthood, separated, and vanished, before I turned two. I grew up in the care of my grandmother, who had raised four boys of her own, and then found herself with four more small children just months after her youngest son left for college.
So – how do you love someone deeply, when you’ve never been loved that way yourself? How do you parent, when your own parents let you down?
