Spread the Love

I tried to think of how many times I told my daughter “I love you” with the hope of hearing her sweet voice say it back.

Love is on the top of my mind lately. I listened to Oprah’s 2020 vision tour podcast on my way to work last week and in one of her interviews, she talks to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He talks about loving his children unconditionally, which I hope (and believe) most parents would say. This is nothing new, but I was struck by the way he talked about texting his older daughter telling her he loved her and expecting nothing back. When he said that I knew I had to write about this idea of saying “I love you” and expecting to hear it back.

News flash: we all do it.

There are probably few people reading his who have never expected or hoped to hear those words back. I have expected/hoped to hear it back more times than I can even count. However, with my children, I’m trying to make a more focused effort to do things differently.

As children, we crave a certain type of love/affection. For some, it may be words of encouragement, gifts, hugs/kisses, or even just spending time together. We also don’t always get the love we desire, so we turn around and seek it elsewhere. People seek it with physical/emotional partners, but my focus is how we seek it with our children.

I tried to think of how many times I told my daughter “I love you” with the hope of hearing her sweet voice say it back. Then I thought about what I do when she doesn’t say it back. I’m shameful to admit, I do the exact thing that pisses me off when others do it. I say it over and over and over again until I hear it.

But why?

Well, there is a multitude of psychological reasons why this happens, but I’m not going to dig through my past to explain them (that’s where therapy comes in handy). The simple answer is at some point, I didn’t get the love I needed. This doesn’t mean I had a life without love. It can be, but for most people, it simply means that day, or week, or month, they didn’t get the love they needed.

Everyone wants love each and every day, I sometimes don’t feel that love at work, so I come home and crave it.

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