My mother worried about me all of the time. If I didn’t call every few days, she would call in a panic, saying “why didn’t you call me? I was worried sick something that happened to you.” This always made me uncomfortable. It left me feeling disturbed, not loved. It was invasive. It didn’t seem like love, but something else. It didn’t seem that she was worried about me, but something else.
When Maria moved into the farmhouse, there was a series of awful blizzards on the days she went out to work. She had a tiny car with no four-wheel drive and no snow tire. I would stand at the window and watch her drive off in a storm with two or three feet of snow on the ground and feel the same thing my mother must have felt, watching this person I loved so much sail off into the dark and cold. Except one day, starting at her lights receding into the snow, I awakened. This isn’t love, I thought. Love is letting her make her own decisions, her own choices, letting her know that I trust her to live her life. What she needed from me wasn’t worry but trust. Love wasn’t worrying about her, it is not worrying about her and putting my own fears onto her. I never mentioned driving off in the snow again, and she made it home every time. Now, she knows she can take care of herself, and if I helped in any way, what is more loving than that?
Recently, a friend, a young woman told me she doesn’t travel because her mother worries too much. Her mother likes her close. Do I worry when my daughter travels, she asked? No, I said, I love it when my daughter travels. I would hate to think she wouldn’t go places because I was worried about her. Love would be letting her go.
Is worry love? Is it loving? This comes up for me all of the time when it comes to animals, and it is a powerful element for me in the Rocky story, which has take so many twists and turns for me, and for others. Our relationship with animals seems especially focused now on worry, rescue, notions of nurturing, comfort and security. Worry about them is almost an ideology. I felt this with Simon, who was, in fact, sorely in need of a new home. Sometimes, we do need to help them, tend to them, yes, rescue them. I feel this pull often with Rocky, seeing him alone in his big pasture by an empty farmhouse. I do understand that this is an emotional thing, a thing that touches deep chords within us.
But among other things Rocky reminds me – teaches me yet again – that worry is not love. For me, loving Rocky means leaving him in peace, to live his life where he is comfortable and things are familiar. It means respecting his life. I cannot guarantee his safety or his health. Animals do not live in paradise anymore than we do, and we cannot worry them into a perfect, pain-free, no-kill world. Life is more powerful than I am, than we are. Every day, I learn more and more about love, and I am grateful for that. And what I have learned is this. It is natural to worry about the things I love, but worry is not love. Worry is not about them. It is about me. It is not for them. It is for me.
