the fable of unconditional love

The fable of unconditional love extends also to the love children have for their parents. We think we love our parents unconditionally, but what we assume to be love is something else. As children we are unconditionally attached to our parents, and as soon as we learn to express this attachment-yearning for them, we are told is is called “love.” 

A child’s love for their parents is  based on the condition that they do not feel abandoned. The love I felt for my parents in childhood was rooted in fear and obedience. The love I feel for them now, as I continue to heal and mature, becomes less about guilt or obligation and more about genuine desire. I can relate to them in a new way now that I am an adult, even though I will always be their child. I can learn what it means to love my parents just as I learn what it means to love my romantic partner, and even myself. 

Also, a child loves their parents seemingly “automatically” because it is a survival instinct. A baby will die without having a relationship with an adult. A toddler will die if they do not hold on to mommy and daddy. We cannot therefore really know if our love for our parents is based genuine desire or fear or yearning for secure attachment until we are adults.  When we mature into adulthood we are suddenly faced with the choice of whether or not we will continue “loving” our parents and keeping a relationship with them. In dysfunctional family systems where love is based on fear and obligation, adult children often relate to their parents in the same way they did as a child: in a largely one-sided relationship. They still need their mommy or daddy. In other versions of this system, the adult child, out of rage at the feeling that they were abandoned, “abandons” their own parents by severing ties with them completely. The relationship cannot transmute into an adult to adult-child relationship. These children were often parentified. Another way parentification manifests is through caretaking one’s parent when the adult-child is early into adulthood. In your twenties and thirties, a time carved out for your own self-discovery, you abandon yourself to take care of your middle aged parents. You maintain a close relationship not because you want to, but because guilt tells you that you must. Often when one parent dies when the child is young, the child grows up feeling a responsibility to become a surrogate spouse and parent their own parent. Thus the adult child sacrifices their own maturation because of a feeling that they owe their parent something. Until the adult child discovers who they really are independently of who their parents told them to be, they will never become a functional adult or create a functional family. 

And, until the adult child faces the truth about their feelings for their parents, they will never know if they really “love” them unconditionally as they say they do.