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The Day My Heart Melted
That rare moment I first experienced the purity of unconditional love
What is love?
In my younger years I felt that the meaning of love was easy to define. In my arrogance and my naivety, I believed I had all the answers. Oh, how I had it wrong for so long!
All I knew about love was from my personal experiences and my heart soon learnt that love held very little joy; in fact I learnt that love was toxic, unauthentic, conditional and torturous in its many forms.
My first experience was parental love — mostly in the guise of abandonment and child abuse. As the years passed the world showed me this kind of love was the norm. I came to know that love wasn’t made of fairytales, in fact it was the stuff of nightmares, if the truth be told.
My heart found the agony of love to be unbearable. The loss, the pain drilled into my wisdom showing me the insecurity, the fact that nothing lasts forever, the wisdom to never fully trust or believe and the powerful knowledge that hearts are fickle, when it comes to this thing we call love.
The shock of finding that overnight love dies for no explainable reason, carries unfathomable pain and destruction is a common theme in such relationships.
Ultimately I learnt that not only was I unlovable, but those who did profess to love me showed me, in no uncertain terms, that love is undeniably cruel.
Until the day I learnt that real love does truly exist — that perfect raw emotion; that pure authentic love; that sacrificial, generous and beautiful unconditional love — when your heart overflows, feels like it’s about to burst and your chest struggles to contain the swelling of this now enlarged organ.
That day I discovered love truly does exist in rare and special circumstances and I discovered this the day my boys were born.
I can still remember the day I first met each of my precious babies.
That was the day I truly understood the meaning of love for the very first time.
The day I held my baby in my arms, my first introduction, was the day my heart almost exploded with the rare purity of unconditional love, that I forever hold for each…
