What Love Looked Like

I spent the first twenty-three years of my life looking for love in the faces of people who didn’t know how to give it.

Foster care teaches you things. How to pack a bag quickly. How to sleep in a room that isn’t yours. How to be grateful. God, the gratitude they expect. Like you should be thankful for a roof when what you actually needed was someone to notice you were crying.

Adoption was supposed to fix it. The paperwork said it did. New name, new family, new start. Except you can’t restart a person. You can relabel them. But the original operating system is still running underneath, full of bugs nobody wants to troubleshoot.

I don’t think I’ve ever been truly loved. Not by a parent. Not by a partner. Not in the way where someone sees all of you. The messy bits. The difficult bits. The bits that don’t perform well at family gatherings. And stays anyway.

People loved versions of me. The funny one. The capable one. The one who didn’t ask for much. They loved what I could do for them. What I could tolerate. How small I could make myself to fit their available space.

Then I had children.

And a small, furious, red-faced human looked at me like I was the entire world. Not because I’d earned it. Not because I’d performed well. Just because I was there. Just because I was hers.

That was the first time love didn’t come with conditions. The first time it didn’t feel like a contract I had to keep renewing.

My children taught me what love looks like. Which is beautiful. And absolutely devastating. Because it means I went twenty-three years without it and called what I had enough.

It wasn’t enough.

I just didn’t know that until someone showed me what enough actually looked like. And it was four pounds twelve ounces with its eyes shut.