Down the Rabbit Hole

Love in All It's Many Variations

30-Day Blogging
PROMPT November 14th
It's time for another prompt from the War Chest! Take a stab at this one:
Share your first experience with love. No ... not like that.

This prompt is challenging because my interpretation of love has evolved so much over time that I'm not sure I'd define some of my first experiences as "love" in the traditional manner. My first crush is pretty evident in my memory, a boy named Brian Bradshaw who was the blonde and blue-eyed apple of my eye from first grade to fourth. My first experience with love though, that's become much harder to pin down. Looking back, my first boyfriend wasn't love...nor was my second or third. The guy I dated through high school felt like a frustrated experiment dripping with teen angst, not the kind of love that sustains one through even the first semester away at college.

My first real long-term relationship might have been love but it was the kind that disguises itself as a red, pulsing passion that so easily hid the violence and jealous rage at its core. That was a love I had to save myself from, flee the broken glass and broken promises, clenched fists and whispered threats. Then, I've also buried love, the kind of love that falls prey to demons and addiction no matter how badly you pray and fight to love it. Sometimes love is not enough to save someone from themselves, that is the kind of love that breaks you in ways you can never really fix again. You leave that kind of love in the ground, along with the hope you once had that it would grow and bloom in that once in a lifetime love.

My first experience with love, the real, sustaining love was when I met my husband. It was that warm, healing kind of love that seeps across the wounded places in your heart like a soothing balm. It was the kind of love that powers a life together. I thought at the time that it was also the most powerful love there was but even then I have been proven wrong.

When my daughter was born almost nine years ago, the love I experienced was that epic, all consuming, full blown forever, I would die for this person...love. It was the kind of love that grew inside me, under my heart, connected to my soul. It is the kind of love that grounds me, makes me want to live each day the best version of myself I can be...for her. It is the kind of love that knows no limits, no conditions and no end.