I think about this quote a lot. I've actually written about it before. My friend Jack says, "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable." Think about that for a second. A few years back, I wrote about this quote in the context of marriage and the relationship between two broken people who have bound themselves to one another, and what a scary thought that is. I called it marriage is risky.
This past week, it has struck me in a new way. CS Lewis's sayings tend to do that to me, I think. Not only because he was a genius, but because he was gifted with the ability to take the wisdom found in scripture and rework, repackage it in a strikingly poignant way. And, like the wisdom found in scripture, his speculations find application in so many stages of life and circumstances.
So, as I found his To Love Is to Be Vulnerable teaching to be relevant in reflecting on marriage, I now find it to have much to say about parenthood. It may have even much more to say about parenthood.
Here's a bit more of the quote, so we're all on the same page:
There is no safe investment.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact,
you must give your heart to no one,
not even to an animal.
Okay. So. Surely you can see where my thoughts went with marriage. Romantic relationships are hard enough when people are in the dating stage... Can you see how the fear could escalate when you've pledged your whole self to another person for the rest of your life? To be loved is to be known, I conclude in my earlier post. What a risky thing to fully put yourself out there, with all your quirks, secrets, imperfections, insecurities... and say, "Please know and accept and love me - all of me."
Imagine, then, how this could affect parenthood, the other most important relationship a person can have with another in this life. While I personally fear less of my daughter 'accepting' me and loving me despite my faults (though I am fully aware of future fears with this, when she's more 18 than 18 months old), the riskiness of love only increases when a child comes into the picture.
I love Daphne with all of my being. It's actually useless for me to compare the way I love Daphne to the way I love Kevin, because it's apples and oranges. Kevin and I have chosen each other. Daphne has been given to us, and she is us. The fruit, the blessing of our togetherness. So, I love her with the love only a mother can have. It is fierce. It is fiery. I will love and I will protect my baby girl, because she is equal parts me, and equal parts Kevin, and yet completely her own unique and dynamic little person.
And even this is not a "safe investment", though all the forces of nature and God himself conspired to place her in our lives. She is no less risky to love than a significant other. Perhaps, she is more so. A child, though a gift from God, demands your heart and your protection and so much responsibility. Yet, a child's life cannot be controlled, from her circumstance to her very will.
This terrifies me more than anything, when I wake up nights with this new baby squirming and kicking inside me. Right now, my body is all the protection little Charles Ender needs. I can fully control his environment, because it's me. I know where he is, what he's doing, and can protect him in a way that I no longer can with Daphne. Daphne is out in the world. I cannot protect her from every bump and bruise she will inevitably receive from experiencing that world.
I fear I am not strong enough to give her back to God, to surrender control of her life to him, to see her as first a child of God and second a child of mine. I feel conspicuously vulnerable as a mother. I am utterly invested in this little life. My whole heart is on the line here. I fear I cannot protect my heart in regards to her no more than I can protect her against the world. Anything, it seems, could happen. This is not a safe place to be, parenthood. It is profoundly risky. It is risky to consider God as capable and trustworthy and faithful, not for my own life or relationship with Kevin, I'm finding... but for my children. Do I trust him with these little lives?
Making myself vulnerable before him, completely offering up my all in surrender, with the knowledge that that must include my babies, is his hardest lesson yet.
