People talk about a mother's love as being the ultimate, unbreakable, unconditional love out there. But people show love in many different ways. Maybe your mom expressed her love by telling you how to improve, pushing you, tough love, making decisions for you, worrying about you, protecting you from the outside world, or sacrificing her life to focus on you.
What if you she let you evolve on your own terms and at your own pace? What if you could be whatever you needed to be?
Did you have a mom who needed you to be a certain way so she could be happy?
I love this acronym for love - letting others voluntarily evolve. It might be a new way to define love for you, but a great one to apply to motherhood.
It's hard to let people just go on their own journey. The more you love them, the harder it can be. The more they go off the path you thought they would take the more you worry about them and push to get them back to where you think they need to be.
When you don't need people to be a certain way so you can feel good, you are truly practicing unconditional love.
Just letting people be and loving them anyway is a form of big, expanded love.
You can practice this type of expanded love now before you have kids by working to be this way with the people closest to you (your mom, your sister, your partner) and yourself.
It means:
