On Loving Difficult Beings…
Not everyone is easy to love. I could argue that we all have our moments where we repulse rather than attract. But there’s a big difference in being hard to love and in being unloveable.
When I was 19 years old, I lived alone in an apartment. One day, I decided that I was going to adopt a kitten of my very own. My mom and I went to the Humane Society and I asked after the adoptable kittens. They directed me to a cage where a litter of just ready kittens waited to be loved.
When I walked up to their container, I saw a puddle of kitties sleeping together in a soft, squishy love puddle. But behind the puddle of cuddly kittens, and the food and water and litter, way back in the corner, sat one little kitten, her face smashed into the corner as if she had been scolded into time out. My heart leapt to love her into belonging.
As I reached my hand into the way back corner of the cage, this little kitten grew scared and did her best to reject my desire. She hissed and growled at me and then stood on her back legs and clawed at my grasping hand. Still, I secured her in my arm and brought her to my chest and smiled and cooed at the hissing creature who would never really be anything other than scared and a little bit mean. I adopted her instantly.
Minka and I lived together for a while before we added my partner to the mix. In the time when it was just the two of us, she warmed up to me, though she was never really easy to hold. When she met my partner, she rejected him cruelly and started up her hissing and growling. It took a few years before he was able to approach her at all. Sadly, she ate some poisonous house plants, and since she rarely made her presence known, it was too late by the time we picked her up and realized she was skin and bones.
Although Mika’s life was difficult, and she would never know it, loving her was a pleasure and the enjoyment we got out of loving this hissing feline was undeniable. Minka was difficult to love but she was so loveable.
The same goes for people too, you know. Even when they are really, really difficult, we are stuck loving them, if we do. We can’t help it. Unconditional love is a redundant phrase. That’s all love is, is unconditional. If you love someone who is wounded, who hisses and growls when you try to comfort them, you know the infinity of love that doesn’t stop at the walls they make.
I don’t know Minka’s reasons. Maybe she was traumatized in the birth experience, or she just carries the ancestral trauma of her bloodline. But some of us are just like her. We are scared to be loved and we reject it when it comes. If you love someone who’s like this, you know two things to be true. You are stuck loving them. And they are difficult to love.
In some ways, we are all like that. It’s taken my husband and I 22 years to see the real humanity within each of us. Even though we have bared it all, the love we have for each other keeps coming. Even me, a little Pisces love bug, resents the unconditional love that is offered. After one such moment of exposure of my humanity, I was offered his love again and I wrote in my journal later, “nothing pisses me off more than being unconditionally loved.”
Isn’t that funny? How we resist being loved? Aren’t we all some variety of difficult? Don’t we all to some degree defend our naked humanity from those who are the most willing to see it? When will we surrender our defense mechanisms and trust that love is real, true, and infinite?
I think that’s each of our journey’s we are taking here and we are making our way to it in our own way. Maybe this is why grandfathers and old men cry tender tears at the end of their days, stunning their children who didn’t know they could be so squishy. Eventually, as we get closer to the veil between this life and what comes after, we sense the love around us and, our defenses weaken, and we allow it.
Whether you can let love in right now or not, whether you love difficult beings or don’t, you are receiving an education on love in this lifetime. It is my personal belief, that no-one can fail the class.