The love of parents for their children is the strongest experience available to us. Having fallen in love with ourselves in our child, we then learn to disinterestedly and unconditionally love another in him: someone who is not like us and does not belong to us. Love for real.
This is the most powerful thing that can happen to a man, what he was created for, if he was created for anything at all, and this “something” is really “someone”: my child! Life begins in it, or rather begins anew, and this is how it continues from generation to generation. It cannot continue except by starting anew, because we are mortal.
Parents pay tribute to their species, so to speak. They give what was received: they give birth, but do not create, pass on by inheritance, and do not produce themselves. We do not «make children» — we make love, and children are obtained by themselves. As they can, so they live.
Loneliness arises from the very beginning, and we remain alone to the end. Mortals born of mortals. Everything starts anew because everything goes on. Everything goes on because it starts all over again.
Everything starts anew, but never repeats. He is not me; I am not him: my child, my love, the closest of neighbors, the most intimate of intimates, and yet quite different from the very beginning.
Alien to my heart, he settles in it as in a conquered country, and suddenly the whole world submits to his smile!
His mother carried him before she knew him, fed him before she fed him, loved him before she loved him. And so it happened: our son, our daughter. Love breeds love. It looks like a miracle, but it’s true.
A small human love — a man and a woman, a couple — turns into this love, which is greater than love, superhuman love, and at the same time the most human of all, the most powerful, the most widespread, the most banal, the most amazing.
You don’t have to deceive yourself. Life would be easier without children. Easier. More convenient. It would be incomparably less worries, incomparably less worries, incomparably less fatigue!
Children are not made to be happier. Children are made for love and through love. Happiness will come if it comes, and last if it lasts, only as a bonus, as a gift beyond what was promised. But happiness is too fragile, too naked, too doubtful.
What can our joy do against a child who suffers? Happiness depends too much on luck, or even (since luck is not enough for happiness) fate can do too much against happiness. Love owes only to itself. So, she owes only to us, or we owe only to her.
A friend of mine wonders how, with the philosophy that I profess, I can even have children. I don’t know what he understood about my philosophy, but that doesn’t matter to me. I know that my children are the greatest love that I have ever experienced, and that I put love above everything else, like all of us. This is quite enough to have children and to love them …
Why would we live if we didn’t love? And why would we love each other if we didn’t love love? Poor nihilists who think they are smarter than the rest when they are only less able to love! Having a baby means proving them wrong!
This is how life goes on, despite death, despite fatigue, despite pain, despite anxiety, and love triumphs — even when the couple breaks — in love for children.
Freud saw this as a grimace of narcissism. Why not?
Maybe we always love only ourselves, and our children only because they are “ours”. A friend of mine adopted a little girl. “They put a baby in your arms,” he told me, “you don’t know him, you don’t know anything about him, and immediately he becomes the most important creature in the world!”
My son, my daughter… Why do we love our children so much and so little — strangers? Because through them we love ourselves, which was to be proved. But after all, in the end we love them, but they are different, and they do not belong to us … This is how we learn to love what is outside of us, that is, to love truly.
Love begins here: not in the child’s love for his parents (the newborn does not love: he is cold, hungry, afraid), but in the parents’ love for the child, in this primary love, selfless, unconditional, thanks to which the child in turn also learns to love and getting ready to love your kids…
How much love was needed, and over how many millennia, for humanity to become what it has become! And how much more love will it take for it to continue to exist.