What I Have Learned About Love (an ever expanding list)

 1.  It is infinite and regenerative.

I wonder if we are made to love.  Or maybe we are and there is just so much that cuts us down and tears us apart in this world that our instinct to love and be loved gets the shit beat out of it on a daily basis.  And if we don’t take care of it, nurse it back to health, it just dies a long, awful death (like Cato in The Hunger Games.  Have you read that shit yet?  Speaking of destroying ones ability to love…).  Let’s assume that we are made to love, since as innately social creatures we are made to form alliances, then that would mean that some pretty intensely hurtful shit would have had to happen to us for our nature to do a 180.  I know it’s wack and frowned upon within anthropological intellectual circles to make generalizations about entire groups of people (although I’ll be the first one to admit that we Puerto Ricans have a propensity to steal bikes so keep your fixies on lock) but I do think humans are made to love.  Why else would babies stay babies for so long?  Horses are like born walking (right?  or something like that) yet Odessa is going to be a year old in a week and still hasn’t taken more than two steps on her own.  She needs more guidance.  And one cannot guide without love.  This is at the heart of what bell hooks had to say Teaching to Transgress.  Teaching and guiding are acts of love because they encourage our intellectual and spritual growth.  How can I want Odessa to learn and run and talk and sing and read without loving her.  These are gifts.  We do not give gifts to those we don’t love.  So yes, human beings are meant to love.

So why then have we seen more violent deaths on this island in 2012 than in any other previous year?  Why have I just read another article about another woman being murdered by her ex-husband in front of her child?  (fuck)  Why did I mark hatred into my own skin?  Baby Odessa, mi amor, these are not questions; these are conversations that last as long as lifetimes.  We are only just starting to have them now.

And here is what I have to say so far.  I remember one time when watching you sleep, I whispered to your father, I just love her so much that I can’t even fathom having enough love for another child.  Not that I wouldn’t love that next baby, that little sibling of yours whom you too will love like crazy, but that christ my love for you is so fucking big I can’t imagine it getting any bigger.  Like imagining what’s outside of the universe.  But then it hit me hard and warm, love is just like the universe in that it is infinite.  That’s why we can’t imagine it but you know it and you know that there will never ever be a day we you crash into its limits.  And just like the universe, it is so easy to forget that we are a part of it, that it is always there but once you look up at Venus slowly (but really it’s so fucking quick!) doing her best to eclipse that big fat sun, you remember the universe and you feel every particle of it on your lucky skin.  You remember love, see it everywhere, feel it pressing against your body as it grows ever bigger.

2.  It is transformative. 

Yesterday I was a healer.  Baby had a fever and cried and cried and cried.   It’s those teeth.  Two more growing in and they look like the first crocuses peeking out of the cold snow.  Her fever reached 103.2 scary degrees y se puso bien monguita.  No tight grip around your shoulder as you carry her on your hip. No standing up tonight just collapsing into a hot and sad little heap of child.  Josue and I took her temperature like mom and dad used to, one of us holding baby on the lap, the other putting the thermometer in the fundillo and then squeezing the fundillo shut so baby can’t wriggle her way out of this awful procedure.  I stroke her fine baby hair as she fusses. 

Yesterday, she wouldn’t really eat but she knew her body needed mine.  And I swear I got no more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time because she woke up so many often to roll over and nurse.  When she rolled off my arm and back into sleep, I could still feel the hot emptiness where her head just lay.

Yesterday I healed my baby with my touch, with my presence, with my body.  That healing power, the desire to heal, the fear and worry that I couldn’t heal, and the empowerment after seeing that I can never existed before Odessa.  Before my love for Odessa.  I am a healer now when before I was only looking to be healed.  And fuck was I looking for it in the wrong places.  I think of so many times I disrespected my body or allowed other people to and now here is this child, my child, who needs my body to grow stronger.  This love has changed me.