On a Parent’s Love
25 Nov 2009, 20:50
I encountered this quote in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic. The quote was almost a throw away line starting mid-sentence in a (rather strange, not entirely agreeable) essay by Caitlin Flanagan titled “Sex and the Married Man.”
“[U]ntil you’ve [had a child of your own] you’re just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.”
Now, let me immediately backpedal from what Flanagan herself is saying here and not presume to tell childless people what they have or have not felt. But this quote captures, better than almost anything else I’ve read, my experience of love as a father.
When we were expecting our first child, dozens of people, many that I barely knew, told me that it was going to “change my life.” I found this extremely annoying, almost enraging, because none of them were at all specific about what they meant. What changed, for me, is what Flanagan describes. The love that I felt for my children from the first moments of their lives was incomparable to anything that I had felt before.
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