Reprinted with permission from Swing – A Memoir of Doing it All by Ashleigh Renard, available from Amazon and Bookshop.
After my boys were done nursing, I always put them to bed the same way. I cuddled them and whispered to them a list of all the people who loved them. “Mommy loves you. And Daddy loves you. And Yiayia loves you. And Papou loves you. And Grandma loves you. And Grandpa loves you…” I would go through all our family members, our friends, and our pets. I repeated it over and over until they fell asleep or I fell asleep. My first and second had always lay silently, just listening.
But, my littlest, Niko, enjoyed the list so much that he often responded with enthusiasm, “Oh, yes. I know they love me.”
He was certain, so perfectly certain. And I loved that he was certain. And I also wondered what it would feel like to feel that certain that I was loved. I had been trying for years to build more connection in my marriage, but my husband, Manny, always fell back into his old habits of being disconnected from me and the boys. I knew that I wanted better for our family.
My inner work hadn’t really changed my marriage, but it had made the thought of divorce feel much less scary. One day I felt clear and calm, and I wanted to tell Manny how I was feeling.
“Babe,” I offered.
“Uh, yeah.” He looked up from the kitchen sink.
“I want you to know I am not mad,” I started, “and things aren’t really bad…”
He tilted his head, looking like a perplexed puppy.
“But I wonder if we should really stay together. I want the boys to have more than we have, and I am getting tired of wanting that from you if you don’t want it, too.” I told him that I was still unhappy in our marriage. If I left him now, it would be for the boys, not in spite of them. I wanted a family that demonstrated love and connection. I was determined to show them that affection and appreciation were not something only girls and women offered. Our sons deserved more love and affection from him, but he also deserved to feel how good it felt to offer it. It was essential for our boys and the people they would love in the future that they were comfortable expressing their emotions. I did not want to be the only parent to model this. And even if I never found a partner who could show them, at least they would remember that I wanted to set the bar higher for them and for their future relationships. I wanted them to always be certain they were loved.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry. I didn’t stomp my foot. I told him calmly.
And he heard me.
I think for the first time, he heard me.
I don’t know if it was my certainty, my resolve, or the fact that I had grown myself into a new version of me, but after a lifetime of being trained to ignore the sound of a woman’s voice, he finally heard me. I had been unmuted.
“Babe,” he looked at me with eyes filled with tears, “all I want is to be with you and the boys, forever.” He wiped his cheeks. “I’ll do anything.”
Manny and I had never fallen head over heels in love with each other, but at some point, we had both fallen madly in love with the family we had grown. Finally, the fear of being vulnerable had become less scary than the fear of losing his family. He agreed he wanted to make things better than ever. He even agreed to start seeing Jacki.
I resisted the urge to ask much about their sessions, but he did volunteer one of her assignments. He was to begin giving me twelve hugs a day. I also hoped that Jacki was in the process of giving him an energy extreme makeover, an affection boot camp, a list of 72 things a day he should do to help him open up emotionally. I hoped there were plans to balance his chakras, cleanse his aura, and reflect on past lives. I hadn’t even done all these things, but I was certain he would require them. But I didn’t ask about any other details, and we focused on a family hug project, ensuring each of our boys each got twelve hugs a day, too.
The hugs often stretched out, turning into chats or cuddles. The boys began to use the hugs as an opportunity to ask us questions or tell us how they were doing. These small acts of affection became our touchstones, our guaranteed times of connection, even on the busiest or most stressful of days. Almost immediately, the boys seemed happier. They were more affectionate, and their manners improved.
I began to understand the intent behind the assignment. Romantic, demonstrative love was something that Manny and I had subconsciously struck from our agreement at the very beginning. Affection was for children and (in the Greek custom) only to be offered by women. We didn’t need that. We were already confident enough, grown-up enough. We had love. We had love like people have an antique vase, up high on a shelf. Or like a couple would check their apartment for appliances before making a wedding registry. Yes, we had that already.
Check that box.
But somewhere along the road I had decided I wanted more. I wanted to feel love. I wanted love to swirl through our house, to wrap around each one of us, to give us a feeling of warmth and buoyancy, to be more alive and electric than was possible for an old vase on a high shelf. I didn’t want love, the noun. I wanted love, the verb. It was love the verb that I felt when cuddling Niko to sleep, when he told me he was certain that all those people loved him. Love was not a box he had checked. It was assurance in action, in the way faces lit up when he walked into the room. The way people glowed back at him, mirroring his light when they were with him.
Day by day, hug by hug, love became no longer something we had. It became something we did. We all became people who were now tended to.
I thought about the difference between the work of gardening and the tending of gardening. The work was strenuous. It was tiring and sometimes mindless. It could be hired out. It was essentially the checking of boxes. Raised beds built? Check. Compost ordered and delivered? Check. Seeds planted? Check
Tending a garden was different. It involved the gentle guiding of a vine over a trellis. It required watching the forecast and carefully planning when to water. It called for attention, protection, concern. It took multiple visits to the plant to see if our actions were helping it thrive. In the tending of gardening, we saw our care mirrored back to us. Work can build a garden, but tending makes it grow.
Manny and I had both signed on to do the work of building our life together, but we hadn’t known about the tending. We liked checking boxes. We liked moving along in life like it was a road, one signpost after another, showing us that we were making progress, proving to the people around us that they needn’t worry about us because we were on the right track.
But it’s not a road. It was never a road.
It’s a garden.