A conversation on love with Cheryl Strayed (part one)

I think about what love looked like for me this year.

This year love is gross. It’s the slug trails of Vega and Joni’s snot on Dan’s black t-shirt, cleaning sick out of car seatbelt buckles and scraping cold fish pie off the floor. One day Dan comes home to find me holding a potty of wee next to a urine colour chart on my phone to assess if it could symbol dehydration. We lock eyes and laugh, and I remember the grossness can be funny too.

Love is physical. The ache in my dad’s arms as he digs a grave for our family’s dog after she dies, the warmth of Dan’s legs wrapped around mine under the duvet, or Joni’s soft, little hand forever reaching for mine on the walk to nursery.

Love is asking difficult questions. Why do I miss Dan all day and then snap at him when he gets home? Why am I less patient with Joni when she reminds me of myself? Why does feeling guilty about the lack of time I’ve invested in a friendship make me less, not more, likely to reply to a message?

Love is also noticing love. Two friends gossiping in a changing room. The smell of my school friend Caroline’s detergent on the clothes she passes on from her daughters to mine, that reminds me of being in her teenage bedroom, getting ready for a disco.

Love is the ache of missing things, too: birthdays, nights out, stories of the morning after. It’s the way my friend Lucy says, ‘You know you can always slot right back in.’ Things don’t always have to be true to be meaningful.

Love is saying, ‘I’m so tired’ so many times a day that you ban each other from saying it, and then sending each other links to The Beatles song ‘I’m so tired’ instead.

Love is announcing to your family, possibly quite petulantly, ‘I just need some alone time!!’ Then going to the cinema solo on a Friday night and wishing you could talk to your husband about the film as the credits roll. It’s wanting the opposite of things at the same time, all the time, and then feeling deeply loved when another person understands that without pointing out the contradictions.

Love is knowing how lucky you are every day, but still allowing space for truth – even resentment – inside that gratitude. It’s remembering that, even when it makes you look terrible, honesty is the glue.

Love is saying, ‘I’ve heard this one before,’ as your partner tells the same story for what feels like the hundredth time. And then, when they stop telling it, feeling what you think is guilt, but is actually regret, because you know that hearing the people you tell love the same stories again and again is a pretty good way to spend your days.

Love is longing for time to stop taking moments from you as you’re living them. You watch the video of you and your partner dancing like young lovers and realise it was yesterday and seven years ago. You look at your little girl asleep in a grownup bed for the first time and think, where did my baby go? You try to take a mental video of the sweetest moments, then write them all down, as if that process might make them last a little longer. As if it might allow you to cheat life, so that you can still feel the soft warmth of a one year old’s cheek on yours long after they’ve grown into an adult who has stopped calling your house ‘home’.

Love is missing someone when they’re around. For all the new connection we explore as parents, some days it feels like Dan and I are walking in the same direction on opposite sides of a river. We shout instructions back and forth across the banks, united by shared purpose, somehow always keeping in step and rhythm. But I miss walking on the same side of the river. Or at least, being able to have a conversation about each other’s day when we get home from work. Instead we shout ‘what?’ from the bathroom and ‘I can’t hear you’ from the bedroom, as we wrestle a child each into their pyjamas. One day I’ll miss these days too.

Love is a way of seeing. Even on days when I feel worn out, as all of us do, there’s a point when I am able to see the sum of a day’s good and bad parts clearly. Or hear it, like a song with some individual notes that sound off key but somehow transcendent when they’re played alongside all the sweeter ones.

This feels like my challenge in love this year: to hear the full song. I think about this when I look at my Christmas tree. Before we got it I scrolled instagram to see my perfect tree: huge, bushy, covered in velvet bows and sparkly lights. Our tree isn’t like that. It’s small and sparse, with no decorations on the bottom branches (Vega has either pulled them off, broken or chewed them). Instead of velvet bows there’s a collection of partly broken things the girls made at nursery with cellotape and blurry photos of their faces in. It’s wonky and chaotic! And it makes me happy every time I look at it. Now I try to see my life in the same way: maybe not as evenly distributed and sparkly as I’d expected, but sometimes more joyful because of the lack of those things, not despite them.

Today’s guest Cheryl Strayed says, ‘You constantly have to stay open to seeing and accepting the story as it is, rather than as you would have written it.’ So I hope our conversation reminds you to look at the story of your life as it is, and to love that real life ‘full throttle’.

Happy New Year!! xxx

p.s I’ve broken the conversation into two parts - part two is coming next week and will be on how to sustain long-term relationships, how to know when to leave a partner, friendship and lots more.

Photo by Holly Andres.

You said parenting teens through the pandemic was the second toughest era of your life.

Yes, only after my mum died.

How has having kids changed your understanding of love and what it requires?

Kids have their own lives from the beginning, but when they're teenagers they’re really figuring out who they are outside of the little orbit of your parent-child love. So much of being a mother, in my experience, is learning how to let go of ideas you had about who your kids would be, and just getting really essential about loving them through their different choices. No matter how much you love them, you can’t protect them from mistakes, from losses, or from going the wrong way for a while. You have to get to the core of what your role is as a parent. My job is not to make sure you get straight As in school, or that you finish your college applications on time, or any of those milestones that I think a lot of parents attach themselves to. My job is to love you for who you are, to nurture and support you on the path you're walking. And that’s hard. I don't want to talk specifically about what's been hard about parenting teens these last few years, but I can say that one of my kids has struggled. And when I talk about being humbled, I mean that I've been stripped down to the essential. Over and over in my life, when I've felt humbled by the universe it's almost always that feeling. You think, I walked around having ideas about how things would be, but this is how it actually is. And I'm going to have to love this.

There are different layers of loss, but one was the idea I had about what my life would be. It never occurred to me that I would have to live without my mother. I took for granted that she would always be there giving me unconditional love, supporting me. Then when I didn't get that, I was stripped of those ideas about what I thought my life would be, and then I had to make something beautiful out of it. That has happened in my relationship, too, when things have not been as I hoped they'd be. In those moments you think, what is that thing that is essential between us? That core love - is it true? And if it is, how do we walk forward from here? As a mother to teens as well, I've had to think, Okay, here's who you are, here's what your life is right now, and I'm going to love you.

I'm interested in the difference between romantic love and parental love. I see a new beauty in romantic love, because it doesn’t take as much from you. There’s a freedom and independence and conditionality to it. But I wonder if that’s just where I am at right now with two young babies. Have you found a way to retain a sense of yourself while deeply loving your kids too?

My kids are teenagers now but they are 17 and a half months apart, so I know that moment you’re in. Having two babies… it’s a lot! They break your personality. When they’re so little and they require a certain kind of attention, you think, Oh, it'll get so much easier. And it does. And yet, it’s harder in other ways. Nothing has been more humbling in my life than being a parent.

As for your question, I don’t know. It’s one I've asked myself, because I don't think I have done that in my own life. Maybe the way I would frame the question for myself, in this time of seeing one of my kids struggle, would be: can I be happy if one of my children isn't happy?

Sacrifice is at the centre of parental love. So, yes, I would do anything for my kids to be happy and thrive. And luckily, my kids are fine, so I don't mean to overstate this. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I've thought about what would happen if you followed the path all the way down. How do you thrive in the world if your kids aren't thriving? That would be one of the hardest parts of love, I think.

People write to me asking different versions of the question: how do I live in a world without the person that I love? You've spent your life answering that. How would you answer it today?

First I would say, I'm so sorry. I know how overwhelmingly painful it is to feel that kind of loss and despair, when you feel you cannot continue forward because the person you lost is so essential to you that their death is like the world ending. It's important to look in the face of someone's enormous loss and simply say to them, it's true, it’s true. The world as you know it did end.

As soon as you can radically accept that what's true is true, you can begin to grapple with: what next? Because even if life as you knew it is over, there you are, still living in the world. The life you have to create now is the one without that essential person. The beautiful thing is that even though you don't want to live with that pain or that loss - you will. You learn how to make a new life. You learn how to see the new world that is defined both by the absence of that essential person, but also by their presence that lives within you.

I reckoned with my mother's death when I realised, it’s true, she's gone in ways that if I could go back in time, I would undo. But it's also true that her being gone has turned into the gift of my life. The choices I make, the paths I take, the ways that I write and love and give to the world - she is everywhere in them. Part of my grief was turning sorrow into beauty and learning how to carry her forward into my life. I wouldn't get what I really wanted - which is for my mother not to have died at 45 - but I would get the next best thing, which is my real, beautiful, sad, lucky, wild life. A life that would be forever informed by the ways that she loved me.

Also, when your kids are little babies you love them so much. You hardly know the difference between them and you, and they don't know the difference either. One thing I always thought about was if I died before they were a certain age it would be in some weird way like I never existed in their lives, because they wouldn't have a memory of me. But I realised they would always remember me in the most important way, because the way I had loved and nurtured them before they could form a memory was in every cell of their bodies. Even though, scientifically, I don't know if that's true, metaphorically it is. All the ways I loved them would have shaped and informed them, and that love would be with them for all the days of their lives. I take great heart in that. And I think it is also true of my mum.

How does the way your mum loved you in those early years shape your life today?

My mum was really good at loving people, and I think I'm really good at loving people too.

What constitutes ‘good’?

A transparency and honesty and free expression of it. I don't hold back my feelings of love. I express it. I'm not afraid of it. I wrote in Wild that my mum loved my brother and sister and I ‘full throttle’ — that's how I love my kids too. It doesn't mean I'm perfect, it doesn't mean she was perfect. Nobody is. But there was never a question that we were loved by our mother, or that we were the treasures of her life.

You have a different life when you feel and know you are loved that way. I can conjecture we both know people who were not loved like that by their mothers, and it takes a life to heal that wound. I had both experiences, because I also had a father who didn't love me like I was his treasure.

We talk about fairy-tales and fantasies of romantic love, but the familial fairytale is powerful too. I’ve been thinking of that in context of the column you wrote about deciding to no longer have your father in your life. How did you get to that point? Did you reach a day when you thought, this is my line in the sand? Or was it age and experience that got you there?

You're right, we associate fairytales with romance: finding the prince, living happily ever after. And yet, at the deepest heart of those stories is the primal love bond between parent and child, and the ways that bond is betrayed or frayed, ruptured or severed. Even if you had wonderful parents, the journey to becoming is almost always one of having to revisit those bonds. Asking, who was my father and how did he love me? Who was my mother and how did she love me? How do I honour that love? How do I betray that love? How do I liberate myself from it so that I can become the person I’m meant to be? How do I return to it? How do I exile myself from it? Those are essential questions a lot of us have to ask as we grow up, whether we had great parents or not. In the case of my father, I had been estranged from him since I was a child, but very much so as a teenager. As an adult I tried a couple times to see if I could let him back into my life.

There were many times I'd think, I'm gonna let him go. But by that final time, I had tried to acknowledge my pain and rage. I’d also tried to understand who he was and what might have contributed to him being unable to love me as a father should love his children. What brought on that final reckoning is I said, ‘I am open to having a relationship with you but first you have to speak truthfully to me about our history’ - and my father couldn't do that. There was something liberating when he said, ‘Never contact me again, I'm so glad to be rid of you’. I realised he didn't have the power to get rid of me. You can only get rid of something that you possess — and he didn't possess me, because I had liberated myself from him a long time ago. And so, it was actually a beautiful awakening. Part of that journey was understanding that I could fill the wound in me that was created by my father with my own strength, my own courage. All the lessons that fathers are supposed to teach their children, I would learn how to teach myself.

What do the words ‘self love’ mean to you?

Maybe it’s not the right phrase for it, because I don’t think any of [us] look in the mirror and think, you are magnificent, I love you. I don't think that’s what loving yourself means. What I think it means is I genuinely, wholeheartedly believe myself to be a worthy recipient of all the love that I give to others. I also believe I deserve kindness, tenderness, respect and love. That’s self-love to me. It's not that you sit around admiring yourself. It's that you feel at peace and open enough to be the recipient of the beauty you exude.

So many of us find it difficult to believe we deserve it. Particularly if you come from a family where you felt you had what you describe as an empty bowl, some absence of love.

If you didn't have a parent who loved you the way a parent is supposed to, you have to learn how to fill that empty bowl yourself. Everyone else was handed the full bowl and you weren't. That's not fair, it's not right, and yet it's true. It's the thing you have to live with and accept. And you get to make the choice: do you walk around with the empty bowl all your life feeling without, longing for the thing that you don't have? Or do you say, okay, I'm going to make this myself?

A lot of people who love dysfunctionally know how to give love but don't know how to receive it. And so, they give love to people who won't love them well.

I think my father loved me, but he didn't love me well. One path I could have taken - and one a lot of people in my position do take - is to replicate that feeling because it's familiar. You partner up with people who make you feel like your mother made you feel, or your father made you feel. And if your mother or father made you feel unworthy of love, unworthy of kindness or affection or any of those things, the dysfunctional way to operate is to seek that out. That's why self love is a different thing. It's going, no, I might have received this story a long time ago, but it was a false story. The true one is that I deserve to be loved in the same way that I can love — fully.

***

Things I loved this year

The Bear

Still my favourite show of the year.

Liorah Tchiprout’s art

Feel so much when I look at these. Love the titles too.

Javelin by Sufjan Stevens

The soundtrack to my year.

Oh My Heart by REM

This place needs me here to start / this place is the beat of my heart.

Past Lives

Made me think about the relationships we form when we’re young that don’t fit into a label, and why they linger inside us decades later.

Looking at my brother’s collages

It’s like knowing him in new ways.

Writing Swiftian Theory

Just for fun, I’ve started another substack with three friends Arielle, Kate and Satu. Once a month - on the 13^th - one of us writes a Taylor Swift themed-post. My first one was on what the Cornelia Street surprise song performance can teach us about love. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can subscribe here.

These lines from a caption on Sufjan’s instagram:

‘I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself.’

Here’s to giving love everything we’ve got in 2024.

With love,

Natasha xxx

p.s apologies for any typos - I’ve been trying to find time to send this all year, but I’ve finally realised: there is no time. But I wanted to try to send it anyway, to do something for myself on the final day of the year! And today done really does feel better than perfect. Thank you so much for reading.