‘I love you so much I could die’
Maternal Love: A morbid perspective
I’m down with the flu, and I write this from a mild state of delirium. Enjoy.
I lay, thinking about motherhood, and the veiled affliction it really is. Don’t mistake me. I love being a mother and it is one of the greatest gifts I have been given. But in that gift lies the inability to handle all that comes with it. I do not speak of the very physical work, the sleepless nights, the responsibilities, the time, the effort and the tears. I speak of the love.
I find it strange that we have books, guides and old wives tales, and even apps these days teaching us how to navigate the trials of motherhood, such as ‘How to respond to a baby’s cries’, ‘How to breastfeed’, How to everything concerning the body.., but there is no manual to decipher the epic download of absolute love that is received into the mother. Possibly fathers also, but not to the same degree. It’s a physiological thing.
The moment we give birth, our bodies adapt, being the miracles that they are. The uterus contracts, breasts engorge, producing life-sustaining nourishment, etc. But what about our nervous systems?
No one teaches us how to regulate the nervous system from the heavy downpour of love we are ill-prepared for. In that, we know in theory about mother’s love, that we will obviously love our new-borns, (heck, our mothers loved us didn’t they), but we are completely blindsided by the qualia of that love until we receive it. I wonder if that is one of the factors contributing to Post partum depression.
We all believe, rather precociously, that we already know love (for that is how most of us end up becoming mothers in the first place). And then when you have a child, there is a massive system upgrade with no warning or stabiliser. Also, if a romantic partner treats us badly or is unable to love us the way we want to be loved, we can cut and run. Of course it hurts. It hurts like a motherfucker, but the world teaches us how to do it. We have plenty of resources and support to be able to protect ourselves from situations like that. But with maternal love, there is no getting out, even though the love is almost never reciprocated to the same degree. And strangely, it doesn’t matter.
At times I think about what it might be like to be a mother again. It is certainly a romantic idea, the idea of bringing new life from new love, but the idea is also scary. Besides my advancing age, besides the physical rigours of raising a child all over again, it is the thought of ‘but what if I can’t handle all that love?’ Surely the extremeness of this love can’t be healthy? (And what sort of world do I live in where I’m led to believe any form of love can be unhealthy?)
We know that death from grief and heartbreak exists, but I wonder if one can also die from loving too much, from the heart being too full, from the inability of this physical body and common nervous system in handling the complete, absolute, overwhelming nature of maternal love. Has anyone done any research on this? Is there a book entitled ‘How to regulate Mother’s Love?’ waiting to be written? Will my epitaph read ‘Kalpana. She died. Cuz she loved too much.’?
