RELATIONSHIPS | IDENTITY | ACCEPTANCE
Favors I Didn’t Ask for
“I assembled your shoe rack for you,” my mother says.
I hadn’t asked her to do it, but this is what she does: acts of service whether or not you ask for them.
I’ve been told I’m a lot of work, but it’s more like my mother loves so selflessly that she does as much work as she possibly can. I didn’t ask for assistance and could do these basic tasks myself, but this is the way she loves me. It irritated me before, as my desperation to assert my independence mounted in early adulthood. But now I get where she’s coming from. I get that she’s just trying to love me the best she can.
As I struggle to form my own identity as an adult, she is struggling to form a new identity of her own — an identity of no longer being an indispensable provider for me. She’s still clinging to the old where she can.
I accept that she will continue to love me in that way, even as she settles into the reality that she is no longer needed but nonetheless loved. I may not love the way she loves. I may wish some things about the way she loves were different. I do know, however, that the way she loves is pure and real.
So in those little moments when she tells me she did something for me without being asked, and she just wants recognition for loving me well, I see past the favors I didn’t ask for. I see that she operates from an intention of truly unconditional love. I thank her and soften in a warm embrace, seeing my mother and her love for what they are at their core.
That unbroken love, though I sought to change it for so many years, needs no fixing.
I didn’t ask for it, and sometimes I didn’t want it, but I can’t deny it — it’s good.
