Lessons from my daughters: Loving to the pain

This article is part of a series reflecting on my values and how they continue to shape the decisions I make as a person, mother, friend, colleague, leader. Specifically, it is about what I have learned from my daughters, who continue to stretch and grow me as a human.

My honest statement to soon-to-be parents is: “You’ve been told you will feel love in a way you have never known before. I’m here to tell you that you will also feel fear and pain in a way you have never known before.”

Becoming a mother, for me, was the single-most transformative experience of my life.?To be clear, I don’t think that everyone needs to become a parent, nor do I think it’s some higher calling. It holds no special virtue.?And yet, I only know that for me there was a before, and an after. In that after live Zoan and Zora.?

Overwhelming feelings

In the after, I felt emotions I had never thought possible. The obvious answer is an overwhelming and all-encompassing love.?I would stare enamored at Zoan’s dark eyelashes, study the curve of her round cheeks, follow the light on her thick curls as she took in the world. I would lose myself in Zora’s warm brown eyes, so inquisitive, seeking, thinking, knowing.?Nothing has ever felt as good as their little arms wrapped around my neck, when I am their safe place.

But then I would be carrying one of them as an infant down the hall and I would almost trip on the edge of the carpet. I would pause, electricity pinning me to the ground while my head compressed with hollow. Just imagining them falling, imagining them hurt, froze me in place. I am in a state of overwhelming fear, unceasing vigilance for their protection, worrying about the world around us, constantly managing the ever-present risks.

For my Zoan and Zora, I feel love, and I feel fear. This most precious gift, my sacred responsibility.?

As they have grown older, the emotion set has become deeper, richer, and more complex. When they fight with each other, it’s all I can do to hold onto a shred of patience. When it’s “watch me Mama” and it’s literally the same exact (non-impressive) movement they’ve just repeated for the 15th time and I’m chastised for not appearing attentive enough, I take deep breaths. I’ve been told they will at some stage become sullen teenagers. That “big kids means big problems” is the next phase. There is so much more ahead.

Loving “to the pain”

So while I navigate motherhood, I’ve had to consider what it means not to be willing to die for my children — which is an effortless answer, born of some cosmic biological imperative — but what it means to live for them.?

And that is what brings me to the title of this particular essay. Loving “to the pain”. It’s from a popular film from my childhood, The Princess Bride. In it, at the end the hero Wesley is facing off with the evil prince, who with dueling sword extended says “to the death!” To which Wesley responds, “No, to the pain.”

It is Wesley’s description of a battle that is not some noble, transactional sacrifice, but instead the pain of the fight and the wound and the struggle, that ultimately sends the evil prince fleeing.

That is my journey of motherhood. Would I lay down my life for my children? Of course, without question. Would I also battle my own childhood pricks and sorrows in order to become the mother they need me to be? Will I love them “to the pain”? Will I pick myself up after a night of suffering and sleeplessness and worry and do what needs to be done to feed the children? Will I unbox past hurts that have been buried to protect myself, in order to prevent these same hurts for my beloveds??

Perhaps for some of us it is not the outer dragon that needs slaying, but our own inner wounds.?

Are we willing to do the heart work, which is the hard work, for our children? This is the path my own parents showed me. But it was my daughters who made me understand what this lesson really required from me. That it was not enough to love them valiantly and nobly, content in the virtues of my expansive intent. And that instead, I had to love them to the pain. I had to love them to the point that I was willing to fight any fight for them to be safe, even if the fight was against myself. That my love for them would run so deep it would actually, literally hurt at times. And that I could take that pain and allow it to fuel transformation.

A life of great love

I remember saying once, at a McKinsey leadership retreat, that my noble ambition was not a life of great accomplishments, but one of great love. This statement was made in the “before”, when I had no idea what that great love would cost.

Today, after over six years living in the “after”, I can confidently say that my noble ambition remains the same. I’m just no longer as naive.?

To my Zoan and Zora, thank you for being my greatest teachers. Thank you for demanding that I grow, simply because I want to always be your safe place, your teacher, your friend. You are my best loves. You’ve shown me that to live a life of great love requires the daily sacrificing of self for others, vigilance over false humility, and a commitment to continual growth — even if and especially when that requires painful inner excavation.?

You’ve shown me what it means to love to the pain. Where the all-encompassing rose-hued warmth carries its own shadow, the fear of loss, the passage of time, the acknowledgement of risk, the awareness of my own deficiencies and the need to stretch them. Where in every catch of breath as I study your faces, I try to imprint you on my memory.?

The love I feel memorizing your six-year-old faces is coupled with longing and loss for those two-year-old cheeks, never to be regained. When you reach for my hand on the plane and I stretch to hold you, my heart expands even as it aches for the lost sensation of those chubby baby fingers. Your riotous giggles make me laugh and laugh and then I hear the whisper of your first baby chortle and know that I will never again have that moment of wonder.

You are all ages, all at once, completely mine and never mine, all at once. You are universes that I could not contain even if I tried, and so all I can think is that I must love to the pain.

I cannot wait to watch you grow.

I promise to grow with you, too.