The Course of Love

Love Lessons

Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide, four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn’t seem a wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable sobriquet: “my parents.”

During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they should be doing. Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins, herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.

Rabih often places his hand protectively over her belly. What’s going on inside is so much cleverer than they are. Together they know how to do budgets, calculate traffic projections, design floor plans; what’s inside knows how to build itself a skull and a pump that will function for almost a century without resting for so much as a single beat.

In the last weeks they envy the alien its final moments of complete unity and understanding. They imagine that in later life, perhaps in some foreign hotel room after a long flight, it will try to drown out the noise from the air-conditioning and dampen the disorientation of jet lag by curling up into itself in that original fetal position in search of the primordial peace of the long-lost maternal brine.

When she at last emerges after a seven-hour ordeal, they call her Esther, after one of her maternal great-grandmothers, and secondarily Katrin, after Rabih’s mother. They can’t stop looking at her. She appears perfect in every way, the most beautiful creature they have ever seen, staring at both of them with enormous eyes that seem infinitely wise, as if she had spent a previous life absorbing every volume of wisdom in the world. That wide forehead, those finely crafted fingers, and those feet as soft as eyelids will later, during the long, sleepless nights, play a not-incidental role in calming nerves when the wailing threatens to test parental sanity.

At once they begin to fret about the planet they have brought her into. The hospital walls are a sickly green; she is held awkwardly by a nurse and jabbed at by a doctor’s inquiring spatula; screaming and banging can be heard from neighboring wards; she’s alternately too hot and too cold—and in the exhaustion and chaos of the early hours there seems little else left for her but to weep without measure. The cries pierce the hearts of her desperate attendants, who can find no dictionary with which to translate her furious commands. Huge hands stroke her head and voices keep murmuring things she can’t make sense of. The overhead lamps emit a fierce white light, which her paper-thin eyelids are not yet strong enough to resist. The task of latching onto the nipple is like trying to cling for life to a buoy amid a raging ocean storm. She is, to put it mildly, a bit out of sorts. After titanic struggles, she eventually falls asleep on the outside of her old home, heartbroken to have left without keys, but comforted somewhat by the rise and fall of familiar breaths.

Never have they cared so intensely and conclusively about anyone. Her arrival transforms what they understand about love. They recognize how little they had previously grasped of what might be at stake.

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love.

Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.

The morning after the birth, the nurses discharge the new family without guidance or advice, save for one leaflet about colic and another about immunizations. The average home appliance comes with more detailed instructions than a baby, society maintaining a touching belief that there is nothing much that one generation can, in the end, reasonably tell another about life.

Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm, or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with serious discomfiture, no “point” to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly—and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, “self-made”: we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realize that life depends, quite literally, on our capacity for love.

We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating—quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.

They wipe her little bottom, time and time again, and wonder why they never really understood clearly before that this really is what one human has to do for another. They warm bottles for her in the middle of the night; they are overwhelmed with relief if she sleeps for more than an hour at a stretch; they worry about, and argue over, the timing of her burps. All of this she will later forget and they will be unable or unwilling to convey to her. Gratitude will come to them only indirectly, through the knowledge that she herself will, one day, have a sufficient sense of inner well-being to want to do this for somebody else.

Her sheer incompetence is awe-inspiring. Everything must be learnt: how to curl fingers around a cup, how to swallow a piece of banana, how to move a hand across the rug to grasp a key. Nothing comes easily. A morning’s work might include stacking up bricks and knocking them down, banging a fork against the table, dropping stones into a puddle, pulling a book about Hindu temple architecture off a shelf, seeing what Mama’s finger might taste like. Everything is amazing—once.

Neither Kirsten nor Rabih has ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, simultaneously the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most. Rarely have love and psychological compatibility drifted so far apart—and yet it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Perhaps all that emphasis on having “something in common” with others is overdone: Rabih and Kirsten have a new sense of how little is in truth required to form a bond with another human being. Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.

Literature has seldom dwelt long in the playroom and the nursery, and perhaps for good reason. In older novels, wet nurses swiftly bear infants away so that the action can resume. In the living room in Newbattle Terrace, for months nothing much happens in the outward sense. The hours appear to be empty, but in truth everything is in them. Esther will forget their details entirely when she finally awakens as a coherent consciousness from the long night of early childhood. But their enduring legacy will be a primary sense of ease with and trust in the world. The fundamentals of Esther’s childhood will be stored not so much in events as in sensory memories: of being held close to someone’s chest, of certain slants of light at particular times of day, of smells, types of biscuits, textures of carpet, the distant, incomprehensible, soothing sound of her parents’ voices in the car during long nighttime drives, and an underlying feeling that she has a right to exist and reasons to go on hoping.

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity. Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract, or a lack of sleep may have on mood.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

Esther’s first Christmas is spent with her grandmother. She cries for most of the train journey up to Inverness. Her mother and father are pale and wrung out by the time they reach the grandmother’s terraced house. Something is hurting Esther inside, but she has no way of knowing what or where. The attendants’ hunch is that she is too hot. A blanket is removed, then tucked around her again. New ideas come to mind: it might be thirst. Or perhaps the sun, or the noise from the television, or the soap they have been using, or an allergy to her sheets. Most tellingly, it isn’t ever assumed to be mere petulance or sourness; the child is only ever, deep down, good.

The attendants simply cannot get to the root cause despite trying milk, a backrub, talcum powder, caresses, a less itchy collar, sitting up, lying down, a bathe, and a walk up and down the stairs. In the end the poor creature vomits an alarming confection of banana and brown rice across her new linen dress, her first Christmas present, on which her grandmother has embroidered Esther—and falls asleep at once. Not for the last time, but with infinitely greater concern from those around her, she is violently misunderstood.

As parents, we learn another thing about love: how much power we have over people who depend on us and, therefore, what responsibilities we have to tread carefully around those who have been placed at our mercy. We learn of an unexpected capacity to hurt without meaning to: to frighten through eccentricity or unpredictability, anxiety or momentary irritation. We must train ourselves to be as others need us to be rather than as our own first reflexes might dictate. The barbarian must will himself to hold the crystal goblet lightly, in a meaty fist that could otherwise crush it like a dry autumn leaf.

Rabih likes to play at being various animals when he looks after Esther in the early morning on weekends, when Kirsten is catching up on sleep. It takes Rabih a while to appreciate how scary he can appear. It has never occurred to him before what a giant he is, how peculiar and threatening his eyes might look, how aggressive his voice can sound. The pretend lion, on all fours on the carpet, finds to his horror that his little playmate is screaming for help and refuses to be calmed down despite his assurances that the nasty old lion has now gone away and Dada is back. She wants no part of him; only the gentler, more careful Mama (who has to be roused from bed in an emergency and is not especially grateful to Rabih as a result) will do.

He recognizes how cautious he has to be when introducing aspects of the world to her. There cannot be ghosts; the very word has the power to inspire terror. Nor does one joke about dragons, especially after dark. It matters how he first describes the police to her, and the different political parties and Christian-Muslim relations. . . . He realizes that he will never know anyone in such an unguarded state as he has been able to know her—having witnessed her struggling heroically to roll from her back onto her stomach and to write her first word—and that it must be his solemn duty never to use her weakness against her.

Although cynical by nature, he is now utterly on the side of hope in presenting the world to her. Thus, the politicians are trying their best; scientists are right now working on curing diseases; and this would be a very good time to turn off the radio. In some of the more run-down neighborhoods they drive through, he feels like an apologetic official giving a tour to a foreign dignitary. The graffiti will soon be cleaned up, those hooded figures are shouting because they’re happy, the trees are beautiful at this time of year . . . In the company of his small passenger, he is reliably ashamed of his fellow adults.

As for his own nature, it, too, has been sanitized and simplified. At home he is “Dada,” a man untroubled by career or financial worries, a lover of ice cream, a goofy figure who loves nothing more than to spin his wee girl around and lift her onto his shoulders. He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely himself.

The world thereby assumes, during Esther’s early years, a kind of stability that she will later feel it must subsequently have lost—but which in fact it only ever had thanks to her parents’ determined and judicious editing. Its solidity and sense of longevity are an illusion believable only to one who doesn’t yet understand how haphazard life can be and how constant are change and destruction. To her, for example, the house in Newbattle Terrace is simply and naturally “home,” with all the eternal associations of that word, rather than a quite ordinary house picked according to expedient considerations. The degree of repressed contingency reaches its apogee in the case of Esther’s own existence. Had Kirsten’s and Rabih’s lives unfolded only slightly differently, the constellation of physical features and character traits which now seem so indelibly and necessarily coalesced under their daughter’s name might have belonged to other entities altogether, hypothetical people who would forever remain frozen as unrealized possibilities, scattered genetic potential that never got used because someone canceled dinner, already had a boyfriend, or was too shy to ask for a phone number.

The carpet in Esther’s room, a beige woollen expanse on which she spends hours cutting out pieces of paper in the shapes of animals and from which she looks up at the sky through her window on sunny afternoons, will have for her the immemorial feel of the surface on which she first learnt to crawl, and whose distinctive smell and texture she’ll remember for the rest of her days. But for her parents it was hardly predestined to be an impregnable totem of domestic identity: it was in fact ordered just a few weeks before Esther’s birth, in something of a hurry, from an unreliable local salesman on the high street next to the bus stop who went out of business shortly thereafter. Part of the reassuring aspect of being new to the earth stems from the failure to understand the tenuous nature of everything.

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. With infinite generosity, it places the small person at the very center of the cosmos for a time—to give it strength for the day he or she will, with agonizing surprise, have to grasp the true scale, and awkward solitude, of the grown-up world.

On a typical evening in Edinburgh, when Rabih and Kirsten have finally settled Esther, when her well-ironed cloth is by her chin, she is snug in her onesie, and all is quiet on the baby monitor in the bedroom, these two infinitely patient and kind carers retreat to their quarters, reach for the TV or the left-over Sunday magazines, and swiftly lapse into a pattern of behavior which might rather shock the child were she miraculously capable of observing and comprehending the interactions. For in the place of the soft, indulgent language Rabih and Kirsten have been using with their child for many hours, there is often just bitterness, vengeance, and carping. The effort of love has exhausted them. They have nothing left to give to one another. The tired child inside each of them is furious at how long it has been neglected and is in pieces.

It isn’t surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find—at how seldom people know how to help us as they should. We may rage and blame others for their inability to intuit our needs, we may fitfully move from one relationship to another, we may blame an entire sex for its shallowness—until the day we end our quixotic searches and reach a semblance of mature detachment, realizing that the only release from our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and noting its many absences at every turn, and instead start to give love away (perhaps to a small person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it ever returning.