You don’t need more love. You need less conditions.

Gosh. Mother’s Day.

The feelings I had about posting anything yesterday reflect the exact complexity of my experience of being a mother.

I have a commitment to complete truthfulness of the experience of being a mother and equal parts fear of upsetting anyone with the complexity of my feelings. Simply positing photos and gratitude would have cheated the depth of my full experience of motherhood, and therefore Mother’s Day.

I love it. Adore it. Every second of being Pepper’s mother, and Mother’s Day was no different. Spoiled by my family and husband, Sibe.

And at the same time, the concept of being ‘a’ mother still totally freaks me out. The identity as a mother still doesn’t sit totally right. While I’ve just lived into whatever my experience is, my mind still wrestles with all of the ideas I had about motherhood up until the moment Pepper was born, I suppose this moment right now.

In service to this evolution, I’m sharing below, for the first time publicly, a piece from a book I’ve been working on in somewhat secret (rare for me), on this complex, beautiful, and very human evolution into motherhood.

🖤🌶🖤🌶🖤🌶🖤🌶🖤🌶🖤🌶🖤

📖 Not more love, less conditions 📖

Loving Pepper is teaching me to love everyone else more, especially Sibe.

For one, I love her so much it makes my heart want to explode. My capacity to feel love pushes constantly up against itself, feeling like fear, but is a constant request for my heart to expand to hold more love.

As I acknowledge this new capacity, it shines a light on where I can expand the love I have for others, in this case, Sibe.

It’s not that I love Pepper more than Sibe. But I definitely love her with less conditions. I love everything Pepper does. Every cry, every poop, every frustrated episode, exploration, discovery, smile and evolution. I marvel at every tiny evolution in skill, development and personality.

I’m so conscious to ask, “Who are you?” moment to moment with curiosity. To let her show me, instead of projecting a personality onto her (“Pepper, she must be spicy, right?”), and when she does show me, to not box her into that display, so that she can be whomever she wants in any moment. And to love all of it.

Juxtaposed against this, I became aware of how much condition I put on my love for Sibe. How easily triggered I am, how much I mentally force him to be what I want him to be rather than who he is (and how much he does this to me).

I want him to care less about details I think are stupid, I want him to like our dog more, I want him to stress less about some things and care more about others. I want him to like sitting in coffee shops with me, to enjoy lingering after the check is paid at a restaurant, to feel differently about people in general.

I decide who he is and react to those decisions. I decide he judges me, and therefore, receive loving comments as judgments. I decide how he’ll respond before I even ask him things. I painted the characature of him in my mind and then expect and project it onto him before he even has a chance to show me something else. And when he does, I distort that reality to match my image of him. We all do this.

But I love Pepper exactly as she is. No conditions. I meet all of my experiences of her with wonder, curiosity, compassion and delight. Aside from a few instances, even when she deprives me of sleep for months on end, I can’t wait for her crying to wake me up at 3am to eat.

I literally complain to Sibe regularly for waking me up from a nap by talking too loudly on the phone.

At first, my massive Pepper love scared me. It felt like it dwarfed and overshadowed all of the other love in my life. I thought it would mean that I loved Pepper more than Sibe, and that eventually, this would drive a wedge between us and he would become my co-parent, or worse — errand boy.

Part of this was conditioning around “what happens to your marriage when you have children.”

But part of it is what I believe to be “growing pains” of your heart.

Our experiences can be simplified into fear-based, or love-based. In other words, you’re either feeling fear or love. That’s it.

When our capacity to love expands, it pushes up against and crowds out fear. The growing love pushes the boundaries of your heart. You’ve never felt this much love before, so it feels like you can only push so far before it ends, triggering fear and worry.

Not because the love will run out, or overshadow. Simply because fear is vying for its spot back.

When I experience this massive love for Pepper, fear tells me I love her more than Sibe. That it casts a shadow.

But when I look at this from love, it shows me the extra capacity I have to love Sibe. It shines a light on the space available.

What if I loved Sibe like I loved Pepper? What if I loved Sibe exactly as he is? No conditions. I meet all of my experiences of him with wonder, curiosity, compassion and delight. Even when he deprives me of sleep for months on end. What if I couldn’t wait for him to wake me up from a nap by talking too loudly on the phone?

In Zen teaching, they explain that most people don’t experience true love. They experience neediness in disguise. They need the other person to be whole, they need the other person to change to fit their mold so they can feel “love.”

But true love is not conditional. True love asks you to be endlessly open to allowing others to shine light on the places where you’re triggered and heal them in yourself to meet their triggers with love. It asks you to not ask anything of them and to love them as they are. It asks for your wholeness to meet their wholeness.

So I’m seeing this differently. Not all the time, not even close to as much as I’d like to.

But when I really see it, what I see is this: I don’t love Pepper MORE. I love Pepper with LESS conditions.

Maybe love is like matter. It can’t be created or destroyed. It can only be distorted through the conditions we place on it.

Being Pepper’s mom has allowed me to experience love without conditions, and its possibility for the other areas in my life blows me away.