Love and Sacrifice

I’ve never truly loved someone and not given some sacrifice to that person.  It is the nature of love to sacrifice something for the other person; be it large or small, significant or inconsequential, love always, begets sacrifice.

For the love of my parents, I lived in a city I hated…and have remained here. Though my disdain for this city has waned over the years, I am still here.  There is a part of me that regrets the choice to stay here, because I thought they needed me.  Yes, I’ve learned that indeed, it was I who needed them, but harboring that belief prohibited me from embracing the beauty what was. My siblings all moved away, raised their families in the place of their choosing, but I stayed. I went to school at a university not of my choosing.  I lived in places I’d rather not have.  I often resented not being able to expand my life by seeing other places, meeting other people or traveling to exotic lands.  But ultimately, my love for my parents meant more to me than those dreams.  For that sacrifice of living here, I received years of family picnics, Thanksgivings with the cousins, weekends at the river, engaged grandparents for my son, evenings on the back porch sitting with my son and listening to my daddy spin tall tales, Sunday dinners with the best fried chicken in the world, learning lessons on life and living, compassion and charity, swimming in the backyard pool and hearing tid-bits about  life in Tallahassee when most of the roads were dirt and boys went to school bare-footed.  I learned about death from this place I call home. As I grew older, I watched friends and family members die, then my father, my-stepbrothers, my step-father, my son.  I understood and cherished the value each person brought to my life, for I had the privilege of living my life with them, loving them and receiving from them the greatest gift one can give, love. From my parents, I realized I had received for my sacrifice, the same love and respect that I had given them.

For the love of my husband, I keep silent the greatest sorrows of my life. I harbor deep within my being the longings and desires that I know because we are who we are, they will never be.  There is no point in sharing the litany of dubious desires of an old woman who longs to start over from “I do.” There is though, a strange comfort that comes when the shine of life has dulled and all that’s left is the calm that only comes from years of being together. We complete each other’s sentences, we know what the other is thinking without uttering a word; it’s a beautiful dance that only reveals itself with time. All these gifts have been given to us, not to me.  We are one and without him, I wouldn’t have the treasures of being Wyatt’s mom, nor he of being Wyatt’s dad.  My love for him is stronger than my longing for life’s little trappings. From my husband, I know the true love of another person.

For the love of my child, I worked.  I worked long and often challenging days. I worked well into the nights, sometimes until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. I worked weekends. I worked, it seemed constantly.  In all that working, I realize now, I also denied myself the simple joys of parenthood. By working to provide what I thought was valuable; I lost the truly valuable and irreplaceable gifts of time with my son. In retrospect, I ask myself if I would change that decision.  The answer is a perfunctory yes and no.  No, because work was all I knew to do; as an adult one finds a job and one works; one does not calculate into the equation the death of their child. When you work for someone, you give them a commitment. So, I committed myself to my work because it was the means for me to provide for my son. Yes, I would change that decision for now I see how narrow-minded it was and it causes me great regret. Regret, for what we did not do, or for how we did a thing and wish we’d done it differently…because I chose to put something else as a priority, because I sacrificed my time with my son for my commitment to work.  Gone is the opportunity to sit in the sun and chat with a young boy growing into a man,  all of that, gone, because of choices I made with a broken compass.  So, from my son, I learned there is value to living life with freedom from all societal expectations and attachments, to bend a little more. I learned to care a little less about what I thought was important and to realize there is an unparalleled joy in simply enjoying life and having a good time.

Sacrifice is what love is all about. When my son died, I understood that sacrifice as few people ever will. Sacrifice, splashed with sorrow, sprinkled with regret and bundled up as love.  There really is darkness and light to everything. When a person tells me, “I don’t know how you feel” I respond with a very sincere, “and I hope you never do.” Sometimes the sacrifice of love is living with the pain of knowing you could not give the very thing your loved one needed. I would have given my very life for my son, but I was not given that choice. So, I live with the knowledge of the past; that life is about sacrifice, love is about sacrifice and it’s often sprinkled with regret. But in the end, with all the sacrifice, I’ll choose love.

Would I do this all over again knowing where I am now?  I’d rather not.  I wish it were different.  Only, I want to be with the same people, surround by their lives and all the accouterments they bring, the same gifts of love that I reaped from them being in my life. I’ll never know what it would be like if I’d made different choices, if I’d made the choices I thought I wanted at the time. I’d rather that my life hadn’t taken this path, but if I had made different choices, I may not be the mother to a most wonderful and amazing son, a child who made my life better, fuller, richer and completely blessed and swathed in love, a child who made me a better person, who taught me more lessons than any other person on earth.  So, for that love, yes, I would do it all over again.