Love, Life + Babies

midlife musings on receiving vs. working

Babies are everywhere lately. I find my gaze lingering. I am drawn to their chubby legs and smile at their sweet faces and I am filled with a pang of…. what is this? Longing??? No way, I’m TOTALLY done with the baby phase!

And then I made the connection - grandmother. I’m becoming a grandmother. Aha! Amazingly, even though my daughter lives on the other side of the ocean and I feel rather disconnected from her pregnancy, my biology is at work drawing me toward that new role.

baby Elora

In Dutch they say that you get children. It’s “kinderen krijgen”, which is not like in English. In English we choose to have children or we simply have children. I always chose, in an active way. This pregnancy of my daughter’s is the first time that I am properly getting a child, like a gift that I didn’t request, one that is coming regardless. Make room.

While you get children, in the Dutch language you actively raise them up. That’s “kinderen opvoeden” which translates literally to “feeding up children.” It is a bit funny that parenting your kids is called “feeding up”, but then again it does point to the essentially active roll of good parenting. There is no receiving here. You can receive the birth of your child as a gift, but the raising well - that will require ever-constant effort and warm, attentive creativity.

raising Aria and Liam

I’m past the baby stage, but ironically I’m knee deep in the quest for a healthy romantic relationship. As I thought about kinderen krijgen vs. kinderen opvoeden, I started to see a connection to my romantic experience.

I have been loving a man who is profoundly different than me. I met him three years ago through a dating app. Our first date was getting ice cream cones, but somehow we managed to have a surprisingly long conversation, and we are still at it. Our connection in words, ideas, movement and beauty is deep. It seems to me that I couldn’t not love him.

In that sense my love for him feels like something I received. It’s just here. Stubborn. Inspiring. Intoxicating and irritating at turns. It remains.

What can you do when you love someone who thinks and lives so differently than you? We are always trying to understand each other. Explain ourselves. Convince the other of our vision. Request accommodations to our preferences, which are often perceived as strange or hurtful to the other. It is a relationship that has required so much patience, humility and curiosity from us both.

It’s not because he’s Dutch. It’s because he’s Floris. He’s a floaty, impractical artist with a messy house, blue pencil on his fingers from his afternoon in the art studio and still undecided about where he wants to go on vacation…. next week. Ours is his longest relationship. He imagines he would always live alone. He looks inward for direction.

And I’m Rachel. Well, you know me - I’m structured, my plans our made, my goals are being met and my home is not just beautiful, it’s organized and clean. I have many deep friendships and spent decades in a committed relationship. I can give and receive love easily. I look outward for perspective.

I may think I have it all figured out. ;) He thinks he has it all figured out too! Only we have reached many different conclusions, in part because we have lived totally different lives into our 40’s.

After dating for 9 months, we broke up. Our differences had a lot to do with the year and half that we weren’t together. Now we’ve been at it again for a while, trying to puzzle together a relationship that allows us both to be ourselves and to be happy. Do you know that’s like? Opvoeden. It’s a very active posture of raising ourselves. It takes ever-constant effort and warm, attentive creativity.

If our love for each other was a gift received, a life in connection resembles more a challenging, but rewarding work-in-progress. We’ve recently decided to keep working on that as friends. This feels like the best way to truly accept each other the way we are - to shift from the idea of a romantic life together toward other ways to enjoy and support our connection.

I’m making room again.