Freak love

My children think I don’t love them the same way I used to love them.

Photos of them have slowed to a trickle along my Instagram stream, as images of romping canines I walk at midday for other families flood in.

They are astute little beings. My kids; not the dogs.

I don’t tousle their hair the way I used to. Or rub their bellies. I don’t make special treats just because it’s Thursday.

“These look pretty yummy,” coos my daughter, reaching over a pan I’d just pulled from the oven and set on top to cool.

“Those are for dogs,” I quickly snap, hoping to stop her from bringing the biscuit she was eyeing to her mouth.

It’s true, of course. The love I show them has changed even if the love I have for them hasn’t diminished.

A parsing of words, perhaps, but true all the same.

It is love in a less concentrated form. It tries to stand back and observe. It provides a little more freedom while it forgets to breathe.

The space between us that is awkward by necessity.

It’s a love that takes fewer pictures. A love that asks permission before it shows them to friends on the World Wide Web. A love that let's go just a little.

This love is tricky. It so easily backfires.

It’s accounting of actions and inaction continually figuring into the here and now, projecting anxiety into the future.

It’s damned when it does, damned when it doesn’t.

I’m already writing the script the kids will be acting out one day in their minds; all the things I should have done that could have propelled them to stardom.

If only life worked predictably and without deviation, we could be [insert greener pasture here].

Of course, we all want this security of a standard, even though such sameness, though comforting, might also be boring.

We all know in our souls that getting what we want out of life isn’t the same as getting what we need. It’s difficult to separate the wants from the needs.

And getting what we need seems more and more fraught now that we tend to define “us” as individuals.

We all know life is what happens while we were making other plans.

How will they define success?

How will I?

I wonder as I let the dust accumulate on my college education.

I get tangled in the emotions of happenstance.

My son is proud to tell his friends his mom is a “... Dog Person. Like for money!”

These days I put my problem-solving skills to work figuring the best way to open doggy waste bags without removing my winter gloves. Discovering, quite happily, the warmth of my breath on a frost fringed day will separate the edges of a bag from its magnetic cling. ... just have to hit it at the right angle ...

“So gross,” says my daughter. “Can you talk about something else?”

“Sure! Did you know dogs are less likely to pull on a leash if it’s clipped to the front of their harness?”

“That’s fascinating, Mom,” my she says with a full-on ocular summersault. “But, I still love you, you freak.”

“I love you, too, you Norm.”