Implied

...To the Moon & Back

My son and I regularly ask eachother "Do you love me?", and the answer is always the same.

"Yes, I do love you."

I tell him over and over that I love him, and that I always will. I tell him how special he is and how lucky I am to be his Mom. I shower him with hugs and kisses, playful tickles and the occasional scolding. My heart bursts with love and pride every time I look at him. Even now, as I type this, he has kissed both of my arms and my back through the chair. When I thanked him for the kisses, he looked at me with those beautiful blue eyes and said "Thank-you for love, Mommy".

It just doesn't get any better than that.

I have vowed to always tell F how much I love him - and I hope he will always feel secure saying "I love you, Mom". If he doesn't say it, will he still love me? Of course, but there's something dangerous about the implied love. My parents love me very much - I know this because they have shown me what unconditional love is for the last twenty-four years, but it's not something we say very often. Infact, when I think about the times my parents have looked at me and said "I love you", I really have to dig deep. It was after a blow-out fight when I was a pre-teen, at graduation, when I left for University, when I was devastated after my break-up last winter. The love has always been there - we just don't say it, and I'm as guilty as they are.

I'm sure they said it all the time when I was a little girl, and I am equally certain that I said it to them all the time as a girl. Why did we stop? Maybe it wasn't cool, or maybe I was embarassed and asked them - I'm not sure. What I do know is that I was positively shocked when I first heard J tell his mom and dad he loved them, and then he kissed them. That doesn't happen at my house - and it hurt a little bit.

It's not just "I love you's" that we skip here. It's the "I'm proud of you" or the "I think you're specials" that we've left unspoken. I can't comprehend a day where I stop telling F those things, because he will always be special and I will always be proud of him. He'll make me furious and I'm sure he'll embarass the Hell out of me more than once, but that's OK. In fact, he's already done both. I believe that's called "payback" (or so my Dad tells me).

I look foward to those big blue eyes looking at me tomorrow, next week and ten years down the road and asking "Do you love me?". We're both going to change a lot, but our answers never will.