The post Marriage Isn’t Over After Kids. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

I initially began to write a piece called, “How to Love a Busy Mother,” but I’ve decided to write this instead.

How to Love Anyone.

Let’s get to it. First, ask her (or him, but I’m a feminist, so we’ll use her) what she wants.

Ask.

Using actual words.

Ask your lover or prospective lover or friend or sister or, well, anyone, what it is she’s looking for in a relationship, or what she’s seeking from another person in general. I know this sounds simple, but there’s a reason that we don’t do this: It’s intimidating to have such a direct conversation because we might have to face directly our differences.

This eliminates game playing, and if she’s someone who’s turned on by that, it’ll be made obvious by her indirect reply.

But the larger point is this: Speak to her and find out from her own actual words how she wants to be loved rather than from mental speculation, which generally stems from how we want to be loved.

Still, love is complicated for a reason.

For one, our needs change, and, for another, the best parts about love are often not relayed through words and, more, love is equally shown when we don’t have to say exactly what it is that we want.

So, for these times, here are a few more tips:

Occasionally, she might act like you don’t exist. This likely has nothing to do with you. The best partnerships come from two people who are already whole by themselves, which means that sometimes, frankly, she has shit to do.

This doesn’t mean that she is more interested in picking up a dirty house or sending emails than she is cuddling or smooching, but life is made up of responsibilities—and a person who’s responsible in other areas of her life will show more promise with being responsible for another’s heart too.

Read over this list and know that most partners would love for you to do any one of these simple (and free) romantic gestures. Most importantly, remember that romance doesn’t have to be showy, expensive or YouTube worthy.

And the reason is simple: Romance happens when we observe what another person enjoys and desires and we take care to show that we’ve noticed. On top of this, loving someone absolutely involves noting an individual’squirks and eccentricities without judging them.

Love really is acceptance.

If we aren’t willing to accept someone’s lesser qualities, then we don’t deserve to also benefit from the great ones, and much of what’s special about love is understanding a person so well that we see these quirks. Which brings me to…

Make time for love.

It doesn’t matter how many gifts we buy a lover if we don’t spend the time to get to know her. Love cannot exist without a patient gestational period. (I made that sound sexy, didn’t I?)

Regardless, it’s true—but we can’t make someone open up to us.

However, we can choose to share and bare ourselves.

Yep, if we want to be able to love anyone, then we have to love ourselves first, which can be a frightening thing to be told when we’re struggling through periods of low self-esteem.

Consider that we can still love ourselves enough to note and attempt to welcome our flaws before we’ve actually fully accepted them (or changed them).

In other words, recognize what makes you you.

That’s it.

Begin here—by honoring self-awareness and individuality.

Because when we figure out who we are, we are then gifted with the potential to like ourselves—as imperfect as we are when compared with some fictitious internal standard of perfection—and once we’ve dug deeply enough to see ourselves clearly, regardless of the assessment, we become hungry to share what we’ve learned with other people and ready to learn about them in return.

And loving anyone, in case this hasn’t been made obvious enough by now, is also about loving ourselves.

We are anyone, and we’re not just anyone—we are beings who want to give and receive love.

Isn’t that amazing?

Sure, we have laundry to do and meetings to attend, but, through it all and over and over again, we want, more than anything, to share love with another soul.

We are creations of love.

We might hate from time to time; we might be destructive; we might all be imperfect—but one thing that’s not going anywhere anytime soon is our innate thirst for love.

Some people say that we are born alone and we die alone, but a huge part of me disagrees. We are physically separated by others through the cages of our bodies, but we are interconnected by something much more solid than earthly skin.

Love is the way your heartbeat quickens when he walks by.

It’s the flutter in your stomach when he brushes your skin.

Love is touch, yes, but it’s also the invisible string that joins hearts, no matter how many miles or daily chores exist between them. Love is feeling that our feet are rooted even more firmly to the ground because, through another’s eyes, we have learned to see our wings.

And it’s important that we not forget our duties to love amongst our other to-do’s.

Because how, exactly, do we love anyone?

We see where potential weakness can be hidden strengths.

And we remain open to love instead of hardening from pain, and we understand that everyone else out there is trying to move through life too—and that love helps us enjoy the process so much more.

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Photo: ClickFlashPhotos /Nicki Varkevisser/Flickr.

This article was first published by elephant journal.

The post How to Love Anyone. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

I say so many things to you, but I rarely say the ones that matter.

I ask you to help get her dressed or to please let me know if you’ll be home late tonight.

I tell you to have a good day or to do me a favor and refill her cup.

What I don’t tell you is this:

I can’t live without you—if life is unfair and ruthlessly snatches you from me, I would shrivel up and die, at least inside.

I love the way that you hold me close and how you won’t let me go, even when you feel me pulling away to do something more practical.

I love sharing parenthood with you, but I long desperately for those nights when we had no one to worry about but ourselves and how we would stay wrapped up together all weekend long, never leaving our bed.

I want to have your next child, but sometimes I fear that this would drive us further and further away from the sanity of childless couples—the types of things that everyone takes for granted pre-kids, naively thinking that they will be “different.”

I was naive too. I was idealistic—if we weren’t, no children would be born.

And sometimes I fear, too, that my lofty and imaginative dreams prevent me from seeing the reality of our lives: that romance has to be squeezed in between potty training and food all over the floor.

It has to be tended to and cared for before it wilts and withers and falls to the ground.

And that’s not to say that I don’t think our little threesome is perfect—I know we are—but I do still wish that I could be more of your wife sometimes and less of a mom.

Yet that’s the strange battle within mothers: we need absolutely to be women, first and foremost, but we also can’t stop being moms.

I feel your firm thumb trace the narrow line of my jaw and my skin pricks and my steady-rhythm heart becomes significantly less steady.

I look in your eyes and I see the boy that I knew would grow into a fine man; I see all of his courage, his brazenness and his own neediness behind the dark-rimmed glasses you now wear.

I see your muscular arms and I see the athlete that fathering did not take away.

I hear you speak animatedly about new bike trails or a new album you heard on NPR and I know that somewhere in you, you’re fighting this same war as me.

Because I might be the mother to your child, but I never stopped being your lover.

I might come to you less often and with less careless ease when I do, but my coupling requirements haven’t changed.

And those evenings when it feels like I’m against you? When I’m grouchy and tired and not the woman you likely want to spend time with? She’s disappointed that she can’t just have one night off—to be with you.

But I don’t see myself being the sort of woman who goes away for weekends with you, without the rest of our family (although I admire this type of woman, don’t get me wrong).

I don’t see myself slowing down in my own creative compulsion to write—to make art that others want to read—because I can’t stop and, anyways, I don’t want to. Regardless, this is one more distraction from you and from our love.

So, father of my child, what I wanted to tell you today is that some things can’t be placed into words and retain their deepest meanings.

I can’t perfectly describe how my belly feels on fire when I curl up into the crook of your arm, where my head nestles just right.

I can’t explain to you that all I want in this world is to grow old with you, but that I want it to go as slowly as possible.

And I want you to know, especially when my eyes are angry and my voice is either numb and silent or piercing and shrill, that I choose you over and over again, and that I’ll do that forever.

While I don’t know for certain what forever means, I’m certain that my forever and yours are intertwined.

This article was first published by elephant journal.

The post A Love Letter to the Father of My Child. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

How to fall apart, and then pick the pieces back up—and love.

This is part two in a new elephant journal series about love. 

To be fair, we never truly heal from broken hearts.

Like flesh repaired, our wounded, bleeding hearts simply form scar tissue.

This article is about how to continue to love—scars and all.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

~ Neil Gaiman

There’s a reason that we build walls around ourselves and our hearts.

Love isn’t only pleasurable and giddy and butterflies in your stomach—it can hurt; it can sting; it can build you up to seemingly tear you down.

However, there’s one problem with constructing barriers around ourselves: they don’t work.

We can still be injured and life can will always be both glorious and miserable—and these self-constructed walls from damage, shame and fear are made of the most breakable glass imaginable.

Because love isn’t strong and hard and rigid.

No, love is pliable and it is strong—strong enough to aqueously bend and contort.

And when we form these shells in order to protect, they actually serve to foster our bitter hardening—they only make us less flexible and able to deal with pain—which is, unfortunately, inevitable.

And these walls—these shells—they are merely fictitiously protective. Rather, we still feel pain and, in addition to this, we become closer to denial and less from denial’s opposite—which is enlightenment—and love is enlightened.

To love is to know.

To love is to see.

To love is to understand the good and the not so good and the perfect and the undesirable.

To love is to illuminate (to be enlightened of worth, value, and flaw entirely) and to accept completely—and love without restriction.

(This includes self-love and love for others.)

Loving someone doesn’t mean that we’re blind to the reality—instead, it’s the complete reverse.

So how do we tear down our walls? (Because many of us don’t get through life without forming one—regardless of their degrees of thickness and how much others believe them to be our impenetrable truth.)

We do this:

We accept pain.

Love is never exempt from pain.

Even the most brilliant love affairs have ups and downs. (Again, love including with the self or for another.)

Instead of closing yourself off from the hardships of love, you have to bravely anticipate them.

This doesn’t mean we accept cruelty or seek out discomfort, but it does mean that we truly become warriors of love—because if we want to experience these ups, then we have to also go through the downs.

We accept defeat.

We will not always win in love.

We will be disappointed in ourselves from time to time and we will be let down by those we care about most. To love is to be able to accept defeat gracefully. (Although this doesn’t mean that it’s inappropriate to learn from it either.)

One of the most difficult aspects of life is learning not only how to get back up after you’ve fallen, but how to fall in the first place.

Let’s just say that I’ve broken a lot of bones because I, for a long, long time, didn’t know how to fall.

One way to learn this acceptance is to understand, too, that our occassional failings are both opportunities for others to show us love (by helping to pick us back up) or opportunities for others to succeed.

We cannot win every argument—but, equally, this doesn’t mean we have to avoid all confrontation. (And, yes, this is metaphorical.)

We see vulnerability as an asset.

We all have our own talk and some of us walk it and others do not.

My own personal talk (the most important fundamental truth that I try to carry out in all actions, words and thoughts) is to be honest and open—even if this means feeling exposed, vulnerable and raw.

The reason that I live this way (and the reason for nearly all of my blogs) is multi-faceted, but the most important is my child.

You won’t see me discuss her negatively on social media—or much at all, really.

Instead, I’ve chosen to attempt to help shape her into the person I want her to grow into being by living as her example.

And I want her to love herself—I want her to love herself so much that she’s not embarrassed or shamed by qualities that could possibly have been perceived as imperfections.

I want her to love herself so much that societal taboos and stigmas mean nothing to her.

(And that’s why, for instance, I wrote about my ADHD more than once and then shared these articles with you.)

Because loving her starts with me.

It all starts with us.

It begins inside of our hearts—this ability see the ugly and the unwanted—and to neither ignore it or despise it, but to welcome it with raw, bleeding, wounds made visible.

And glass is formed from supercooled liquids—it’s not a true solid.

And a watery human heart isn’t meant to become embittered—and to harden.

A bleeding, flesh-formed heart is meant to house molten emotions, because it’s in this fragile state that it’s the strongest; when it can light up, and be on fire—and ready to love.

 “The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself…That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.”

~ Neil Gaiman

Photo: Neil Fowler/Flickr.

This article was first published on elephant journal.

The post How to Heal a Broken Heart. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.