(((((((Hope-full)))))))

I've thought a lot about your post...and I've started writing/deleted/came back/tried again/deleted/etc.

A few years ago in therapy, I said to T, "I don't think anyone loved me growing up"...which was true in my family...and T asked "was there ANYONE? A teacher, maybe? A friend?" and I really thought about it and I realized that I felt loved by my third grade teacher and my best friend's mom. I'm still really grateful to T for pushing me at that moment, because it gave me a point of reference...I WAS loved, by someone, and this is what it felt like. Safe, and like even if I was "in trouble" they still cherished me, and like somehow they were able to see some good part of me that I wasn't even sure existed.

People who used the words "I love you" when I was growing up were people who hurt me, and I have pushed love away for YEARS because of fear, feeling undeserving, wanting to be left alone...just a huge self-protective shell that I constructed around myself.

I've always had an easy time giving love freely to other people. I just talked to T about this a couple of days ago. I have this deep, deep belief that people are basically good, although I don't know exactly where that comes from. I find joy in my kids, and my friends, and I have a feeling like I want to wrap them up somehow, or feed them nourishing things (bread I bake, kind words..). I want them to be able to feel their goodness, to REALLY know and experience that about themselves...to *get* that they are good enough, just how they are. I love T, too.

I am starting to let love in. I find it hard, still, to believe that it can be real or safe, and it is still VERY hard to not push it away. It's easiest to let my kids love me, and after that, it's easiest to let T love me. It's hard with H, still, but I am trying. For me, the biggest piece of the puzzle is believing that I *deserve* love. Gak. It's HARD. Really, really hard.

I've read a few times that love is an action word. That we love people by doing loving things for them. Letting someone do something loving for me is impossibly hard...it means being vulnerable, it means opening myself up in some way, it means not being this independent island-of-a-person. Maybe that's why I can feel T's love so strongly. I've let down my guard, and he's shown me over and over again with his actions that I am loved.

One thing I know for sure, hope-full...you are absolutely, completely, essentially, deserving of love. I don't have a single ounce of doubt.