On Feeling Loved

And On Feeling Unloved

I think we all grow up feeling unloved, in some way.

That’s why books like “The 5 Love Languages” are so popular. We all go out into the world looking for that person to love us. To fill the gaps.

And we end up with the same pitiful, painful feelings instead. Not always, but mostly.

We walk through life feeling unloved.

We bicker about it.

My wife often complains to me that I don’t love our daughter as much as I love our son. “It’s just a feeling I have,” she tells me.

She says I treat them differently.

I never really understood what she was talking about. After all, our son is a little different. He’s autistic. He has different needs. And anyway, all kids are different.

You can’t treat them all the same.

One time, I was stepping out of the car. I leaned in and gave my son a kiss. And I leaned over and blew a kiss to my daughter.

My wife complained. Earlier this evening, she recalled it and said that our daughter would have wanted me to walk around to the other side of the car and give her a kiss too.

I felt pretty good about the amount of love I sent in that flying kiss. But to my wife, it screamed, “DIFFERENT. UNLOVED.”

I never really connected it until tonight.

But I was sitting down speaking with my wife about something that happened earlier in the day…and I felt completely unloved.

Strongly so.

After she left the room, I took some time to release it. I took a shower. I cried for a good 30 minutes. In going along with Michael Singer’s teachings, I let it come up and relaxed away from it.

More stuff came up, and I released it too.

And that’s when I saw the connection.

I thought about my childhood and how, when my mother was mostly away and my father was the one in charge, I lacked the emotional support I had with my mom.

It felt horrible to me as a kid. I felt unloved.

Mind you, my father is not a bad person. In fact, he’s full of love. He just wasn’t my mom. Didn’t do things her way.

When it comes to my son, my biggest fear is exactly that situation. If I were to ever disappear from his life, who would love him as much as I do?

Who would be as patient?

Who would know how?

He’s not an easy kid. He screams. He hits. He gets into moods and no one can calm him. He’s both a joy…and extremely hard to handle.

And I worry that if someone else had to raise him, they wouldn’t take as much care. They wouldn’t protect his heart the way I do. They wouldn’t know how.

They’d just get angry. And he would feel unloved.

It seems my wife feels the same about our daughter.

She thinks it’s a biological mother thing. Do fathers experience this too? Adoptive parents?

It’s hard to say. After all, I can only really see things from my own perspective.

I do have similar feelings about my daughter. I get upset when other people engage with her in hurtful ways. When they don’t really listen to her and acknowledge her feelings.

But with my son, it cuts much deeper. It’s raw.

I think it’s because he’s been so difficult to raise.

Although…after the cry I had tonight, I think that rawness might be over. I think the fear about him not being loved had more to do with me feeling that way.

And anyway, we all turn out fine in the end. We all find our own way.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad a few years ago.

He was going in for heart surgery, and he was pretty sure he was going to die.

When he called me to tell me, I was away at a work conference. I walked around like a zombie after, trying to process it all.

“If I die,” he told me, “there’s something you need to know.”

A few months later, we were having a similar conversation after another scare. He said, “You’re okay, right? You’ll be okay?”

I think he still worries about me.

Maybe that protective feeling never goes away after all.