GREENER PASTURES: Love Seeks to Bestow a Blessing

Love seeks to bestow a blessing. It is of love's nature to bless, which means to cherish, to affirm the life of another. We certainly need to be blessed by the significant others of our lives, beginning with our mother and father, upon whose blessing all subsequent affirmations are built.

There is a distinct blessing parents are meant to bestow on their children. Doing so is essential to their role. If either mom or dad does not bestow this blessing, a crater of need is carved into our being which no one else can ever quite fill. While it helps to have had at least one parent bless us, to have that need truly filled requires the blessing of both. Perhaps the more significant of the two is the blessing of our same sex parent, with whom we generally most identity. This is not always the case, however. It was my single parent mother who taught me how to love, and whose blessing mattered most.

If we were to put the parental blessing into words, they might run like this: "I love you, and I approve of who you are and what you will do. I am proud of you, I believe in you and I will always be there to support you, even if only in spirit."

I remember a woman I counseled who desperately wanted to hear those words from her mother and father. But she never had. Her father remained silent on the issue, even when as a mature woman, she broke down and begged him to say he loved her. He changed the subject.

Her mother did at least say she loved her, upon her earnest request. Yet she did so in a way that seemed cruelly casual and flippant. She told her, "Of course I love you," in a patronizing, "There, is that what you want?" tone and manner. Her words left the woman feeling almost worse than before she had asked. This time she changed the subject.

She came to me wondering what to do. If her parents would not give her their blessing, from where could she get it? Though her husband and children sought to affirm her, though her friends and coworkers offered her abundant approval, the crater generated by the absence of parental blessing remained unfilled within her.

I told her that her parents likely had never received the blessing of their own parents, and that they were probably unable to give what they had not received. I said that the empty space in her soul marked "parental blessing" would likely always remain unfilled. Yet that void did not have to continue to plague her, for she could learn to work around it; she could nevertheless learn to accept and feel cherished and affirmed by others.

The key was that she would have to become her own mother and father. She needed to be the parent to herself that she never had. This is what self-love is really all about. Self-love is our ability to bless, to hallow ourselves. As Rabbi Hillel famously said, "If I am not for me, who is? And if not now, when? But if I am only for myself, what am I?"

The truth is, you can and already do love yourself – even if you don’t feel it. It is not only for your parents to bless you; it is also for you to bless yourself. And it is in you to do so; you just have to risk believing it.