V - Love

Love

“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and action.” Erich Fromm, The Road Less Traveled.

At 56 years of age, I am finally daring to put my writing out into the world. Up until now I have spent time and money, lots of both, writing and rewriting the events of my life and recording the inner workings of a depressed mind in poetry and song. Although I have escaped the Mennonite World, and yes, it felt at first, like an escape, I have not been able to find a secular community like the one I left years ago.

When I spoke on the phone with my mother who was still in Winnipeg, it didn’t take long before she’d asked, “Are you going to church?”

I tried to avoid giving her an answer. I wanted to say yes to please her but that felt like an even bigger sin.

Her insistence, pleading and cajoling didn’t help.

In bell hook’s book “all about love” hook starts off with Fromm’s definition of love and explains how if she had known what love was then she might have made different choices in her intimate relationships. She distinguishes between love, affection, care and delight. “My family of origin provided, throughout my childhood, a dysfunctional setting and it remains one. This does not mean that it is not also a setting in which affection, delight, and care are present.” bell hooks, 2000.

This is liberating. It allows me a more intricate, complex and nuanced understanding of what I did and did not receive growing up. It allows me to acknowledge the “good stuff” but not to minimize the damage done growing up in a religious home.