Can you love an ugly child? Fat, tiny, whiny and useless, suddenly appearing into your life? Is it organic or manufactured, artificial or natural?
Can you love an ugly child who looks like trouble growing with hunger and thirst, who does not belong here or anywhere but needs a place to stay? Whose whole being yells how out of place she is even though she is quietly looking at you.
Can you give affection to a little beast who is an image of you? Maybe forgotten and hidden. Who reminds you of your weaknesses, your desires which you cannot attend to and fulfil because of that visible existence of someone new, an invader, an intruder grabbing you from your gut. Sounds like a leach.
Can you put priorities of your own aside and love someone with two heads and a heart that pounds noise in which nobody can sleep, unconditionally, without saying you owe me?
Screaming, needy and pathetic, noisier and messier. Heads following sudden ideas, not obeying anything said. Someone with three legs, several hands and wide open mouths nonstop.
Can you love an ugly child that needs to be loved more than you could ever imagine, loved more than you love yourself?
Put all your warmth on that tiny body that breaks everything just to try out what happens? How much warmth do you have to spare and what changes?
child
Converge diverge converge diverge
Mum and child from Finland, 2017
Converge diverge converge diverge No not like that, let me show you. Is there a right way to do this?
First you shred a picture in a shredder, pictures, as many as you have, maybe all of them. You can do it by hand, tear a picture into little pieces. Then you put the pieces back together and look at the picture. Crunch it, it starts to look like the picture experienced something. Experiences of a picture. There is never a good time, there is never a decent time, there is never enough time, so you can do it now. Hopefully you have a shredder. As long as parts get together in order, they get what they need in form of see-through tape, see through tape, togetherness of pieces, end of loneliness of shreds, glue in hands, glued.
People who put their all in a shredder for whatever reason and end up putting things shredded back together again hoping things would be better, the same or at least become something whole, some kind of result and an event of making an effort. Like true love, whatever that is other than hard work, maybe it is more true, when broken and put back together again, light and revelation, fixing something broken. It must be the kind of love between mother and child in an equation, that the mother loves her child and does not put her child in to pieces.
How to keep your child whole, unbroken but not like an image or why should you keep your child from harm? Over-protection can do an awful lot of damage. How closely can you adjust the pieces that belong next to each other? Something has to be broken. Do we have to get something missing also? To have a reason to look ahead.