We have a Grown-Up Kind of Love

When Emilia was about 6 months old, Kyle and I used to get life insurance. At the time, I joked about it: we look! We're so mature! And adult! Adult, even! GO US. I also told the story of how, in the life insurance application process, a nurse visited our house to take blood samples and I fainted. Two times. These are the things that I felt more comfortable sharing this process: it made me feel like an adult, and it also made me faint.

The thing was, though, it was much more complicated than that. He was, as they say, loaded. The reason that getting a life insurance is a grown-up thing to do, why it feels so adult, is because it requires face the kind of reality that only adults, mostly are equipped to deal with, or that we become more mature in the process of confrontation: the fact that your life is, in fact, over, and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that you could reach the horizon of its finitude before you are ready. So you better be ready. Especially if you have kids

In a word :. You could die and leave your children without parents. Say it is sobering is underestimating things to the extreme. This is the kind of thing that makes you want to crawl under the covers with his fingers in his ears. This is the kind of thing we wish we could just push and refuse. But this is also the kind of thing that speaks loudly to the full force of parental love. This is the very definition of love: it is a love that confronts the fear and do not retreat. It is a love that looks at all the scary things in the world and wondered, what should I do to protect my family from these things? And what should I do to deal with the reality that despite all my efforts to fight it, bad things can still happen? It is a love that does not wear rose-colored glasses. It is a love that looks at life and the world and time and everything and strains to see as clearly as possible. This is not the kind of love we associate with Valentine; it is not warm and fuzzy and wrapped in red satin bows. But it is the most important embodiment of love, no doubt, because it is this love that cares and gives care, and actively fulfills its promise to honor and protect.

The issue of life insurance came back recently because of all the recent changes in our lives. When we got the life insurance there nearly six years, Kyle was the main breadwinner; I was a dependent spouse. That changed - it is reversed - and there are many things about this change, the inversion, which have been difficult for us. But we had to face, and name, and sign documents that said, now, you are the main breadwinner, and you are not; You must be fully assured, while you do not. This has not been easy. We had to wade through the thicket we live a different life now, a life that is difficult to navigate at times, a life that proves difficult sometimes for us to navigate as partners because the nature of the partnership has changed . But we did.

Because we are adults. And that's how we like now.

This is how we love.