This is the Better Way to Say, "I Love You"
#019 Love - Let's All Say it Better
Saying, “I love you” has been ingrained into most of us as the chief manner for communicating love. But, I want to share with you that there’s a better way to say it.
I was in custody of Child Protective Services (CPS) in the second grade. I knew who they were and I wanted them to take me. I really believed that I wanted whatever greener grass they had to offer. Sometimes my sister and I didn’t eat. Sometimes our dad spanked us. Sometimes our dad sat in silence and then disappeared right through the front door.
Maybe CPS was going to change that. But my built-in adult snark of a mouth was married to a seven-year old brain, concocting a born sassiness that would repeatedly fail to get what it wanted then.
A CPS investigator pulled my younger sister and I into a room away from our dad. She sat behind a desk and laid her peachy-toned hands on the table as she wrote things down and simultaneously asked us questions. I thought she was kind and trustworthy. I told her everything.
When she asked if I’d ever been sick, I said yes. And when she asked whether I’d been taken to the doctor for it, I simply said, “My dad doesn’t take me.”
She paused here. Dug deeper. She wanted to know what exact illnesses I had that warranted trips to the doctor.
I racked my seven-year-old brain for words I didn’t know. Then, this CPS investigator did the thing she was not supposed to do with kids. She fed me answers. When I heard the word I felt my uncertainty and confidence clash in a moment that I can only describe as, sounded like the right illness.
With exuberant confidence I said, “Yes! Yes, it’s pneumonia!”
It feels really good to tell on your parent, especially when you’re a child with an attitudinal makeup like mine. I remember how accomplished I felt after our interview. Like a rush of energy had just flowed out of me.
Besides, I didn’t always like to have to hand-crack the pecans that fell from the tree in our backyard. My sister and I only got in trouble at school because the teacher didn’t like us.
The next thing I know I’m in a room with my dad, and the CPS lady. This time, my dad’s questioning me. He asks if I was sick, and I tell my former U.S. Army father, who is four decades older than me, “Duh!” as I roll my neck in front of him, not understanding why my adult dad has asked me such an obvious question.
But it’s because he knows what’s wrong. He knows that he must curate a conversation in front of this CPS lady, or else he’s going to lose his children. He flows with my sassiness because he knows that I’m flawed and snarky.
“Danver, have you been sick with pneumonia?” He asks.
“Yes, Daddy. And you didn’t take me to the doctor!” I say.
Then he asks, “Danver, what is pneumonia?”
I roll my neck and holler, “Duh, Daddy, this is pneumonia!” I point to the rash on my arm between the inner folds of my elbow.
I’m not immediately corrected. I’m sent out of the room to join my sister to play with the toys they’ve got sprawled out on some carpet.
In the car ride home, my dad is quiet behind the steering wheel. Then he gives me the definition of pneumonia — that it’s something to do with lungs, and coughing and not with the itchy rash on my arm. He stops at a pharmacy and buys a big tube of Cortizone, and he says that it will stop the rash from itching. I feel happy about the medicine.
Years later my dad told me that the CPS lady profusely apologized to him after I left the room. He calls her an, “Idiot!” And he wonders how many families might have been separated from her failure.
I imagine that she must have felt guilty. She was ready to take my sister and I into custody then. But she’d reluctantly agreed to let me enter the room so that my dad could ask me a few final questions in her presence. She’d told him, “No funny business!”
I laugh at this memory now. My father too. It’s a bit of a hallmark moment between my father and I. It was a time when he knew what kind of child I was before I even knew myself. And the moment also reminds me, in a way, of his peculiar and indirect way of expressing love.
My dad was adamant about proving love through actions. Saying the three words was not his thing. So, I don’t have the memory of my father’s voice and those words. I do wish that I did. I do wish that I had the memory of his voice in my head saying, “I love Danver.” But I don’t.
Have you heard your name said directly after, “I love…”?
Have you heard how your name reverberates in your ear from a loved one’s voice? There’s something especially poignant in letting your loved one’s name touch that lovely word, love.
The resonance of “I love you” is a familiarity shared with much of the world. It’s cute, but impersonal. It’s common, and it works. It’s good, and not bad. But the way we express love could be better. It could heal the hearer. You could choose to pierce the hearts of those you love. Inject their being with the resonance of those powerful words, and your voice.
But please, use none of that formal grammar. “I love you, [name]” ← This is not the way.
So, this newsletter is a plea of love to the rest of you — a very simple yet radical request for you to speak your love better to those you love — where the sound of love may echo inside the receiver as a beautiful resonance into one’s own self.
Go tell them not only “I love you,” but also, “I love [insert name]” And say it enough!
Many thanks to the Foster writer collective for its writing container, writing circles, and so many other beautiful writer resources.
With spirituality there’s always an infinite number of paths one can take or explore. I am a proponent of being well-prepared before embarking on a spiritual journey, which is not currently the cultural approach of the West because of its dismissal of many of our wise, earlier ways. If this idea of being prepared resonates with you, you can learn more here.
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I'm in tears, Danver. Thank you for this.