A Distorted View of Love Can Build You Up Or Tear You Down

“Love your neighbors as yourself,” a quote I heard from childhood. In order for you to love someone else don’t you have to love yourself? What is love? Is it about receiving gifts? Or someone liking you because you are a good person?

Why didn’t I like myself? Both parents don’t leave you if you are valuable. I added up the situation and came to the conclusio
I must not be worth much. When I was born into the family of the man who molested me I was treated special. I could do no wrong. His wife, my grandmother, showered me with gifts, separated me from my younger siblings; that had to be love. For a number of years after we left her, her generosity was the measure of love for a long time, until I lived with the other set of grandparents.

I grew up with a distorted view of love. They must love me because they give me stuff and plenty of it. I’m special. That was in that house. When we moved in with my mother’s people I expected the same but instead I was persecuted because I looked like my father. If I was his look-a-like, then from the way I am being treated it can’t be good.

What I learned from that, some people love you and others don’t. I didn’t do anything for the first set to love me. They loved me because I existed in their family. But things were different at the other house. This is where I learned to earn love. I thought if I work hard at pleasing them surely I would win their love.

How could I know what love is coming out of these two views of love? Is love about getting gifts, or is it something you have to do to make others love you? It was confusing. No matter what I did my mother’s mother never cared, she was unloving towards me. Finally, I stopped trying, took the ridicule for lack of perfection and how looking like my father doomed me to failure in life.

There was something else I learned about love: we can judge ourselves, what we are capable of doing based upon our relationships with others. These two relationships made me not want to love. They were too confusing. The result, I felt unlovable. How could I be the granddaughter to both and yet experience such conflicting emotions.

I favored my father’s mother over my mother’s mom. In the years to follow living with my mother’s mom I would reflect many days on the love shown by the other grandmother on my father’s side. This was my treasure, my pleasant memories.

That gift giving show of love was better than nothing. Sometimes we look at the jou
ey and the stops along the way and we see lemons, but the victory is won when you can make lemonade out of each. So you ask, where is the sugar for the lemonade with those two grandparents? That distorted love, through giving, sustained me on the next jou
ey to the other grandma’s house.

The lemonade happened going from one grandparent to another: I accepted her as she was. I couldn’t earn her love. I had to accept her the way she was, like it or not. Looking back I can now be thankful for her meanness. She prepared me for life, how to take the bitter with the sweet; how to bounce back, regroup when others don’t like you, how to make lemonade out of lemons.

She let me know that I was no special than any of the other children. She taught me how to overcome rejection.

“Dear Grandma: you didn’t live to see me grown up, but had you lived I would have showered you with much affection because you had a part in making me who I am today. Rest in Peace.”

To my other grandmother I would have written: “Dear Grandma: Thank you for showing love, even though you can’t buy love. I pray that you died in peace because I now know why you gave so many gifts. You were trying to make up for my grandfather’s sin against his own granddaughter. . . the sin of incest.”