You may or may not have heard how much I dislike A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Nevertheless, she certainly does have a way with words, and this is one of my favourite passages.
In the passage below, she describes the feeling of the love of a child, and I must say, it's written beautifully.
About Love and Loss and Fear
I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either —who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after.
But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear.
You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what
tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is
more magnificent.
Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?”
The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course
of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was
that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as
improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know,
those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just
millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.
And let me tell you two other things I learned.
The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or
when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child,
something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them,
everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear.
It’s not biological; it’s something extrabiological, less a determination to
ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself
inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things
that want
to destroy what’s yours.
The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.
But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief.
Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again.
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