Two summers ago Stacy and I rescued and socialized a litter of feral kittens. It looks easy typed out like that in a single sentence, but it took hours and hours and weeks and weeks of sitting so still and so quiet on a hardwood floor, not making eye contact, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing them to trust us. And of course it did. They were born in an alley and we tricked them into a trap and took them away from the only home they’d ever known and carted them off to the ASPCA in a giant loud truck and had them neutered and spayed and ear-tipped (just in case it was too late and they couldn’t be socialized and they had to go back to the streets). They were starving and then they were in shock and then they were in surgery and then they were in a strange and terrifying new place.
A few months in, just when they’d all finally started letting us gently pet them without using food as a bribe or a distraction, they got sick. Very sick. The vet told us they had a virus that was almost always fatal to kittens, but we decided to have them treated anyway. To give them a fighting chance. They survived the first night at the emergency hospital, around the clock monitoring and IVs in their little paws. And they survived the second night too. And another.
The problem was they’d stopped eating. None of them would touch a single bite of food, and kittens are almost always hungry; kittens will eat anything. The vet called us and said, medically, the best thing for them would be to stay at the hospital, but science isn’t everything and sometimes you gotta love a kitten into living. We brought them back home in makeshift carriers: Blue Apron delivery boxes with holes cut into the side, and before we even got out of the parking lot, one of the kittens reached his white paw out through the cardboard window. He held my hand the whole way home.
Our rescued kittens were so scared of us for so long. Scared we were monsters who were fattening them up to eat them in a stew. Every baby step was such a victory. They ate with my hand on their food bowl! They put two paws onto my shoe! The day we got home from the hospital, I put out their food and they ate every single kernel, licked that plate clean. They crawled into my lap, all four of them, and went to sleep in a pile. They lived.
Stacy and I have been together six years, during which time she has never once said or done anything to deliberately hurt me. And the same is true for me. We both had childhood trauma that shaped and molded us, and when conflict happened in our relationship, that trauma manifested itself in ways that rubbed each other raw. What she needed and what I needed in the hard moments was the opposite thing and it sent us on some spirals and wrapped us up in some cycles. We cried; lord, we cried. We loved each other. We were so special together. But we couldn’t stop hurting each other in the ways that we protected ourselves.
Several years into our life together, I had my hand on Stacy’s knee while she stared at the floor and I made increasingly desperate eye contact with the therapist sitting in front of us. The therapist said, “Sometimes when we suffer trauma as children, and that trauma is triggered as adults, we react like children because in those moments we feel like children. As helpless. As scared. Without the emotional and physical resources of the adults we actually are, without the perspective of our lived experiences. In these moments, in this spiral, you’re both just terrified girls.” She was right and it changed everything. Stacy and I never get sucked into that spiral anymore. I see her. And she sees me. We reach out and we hold each other close and I can feel it in the now and I can feel it across space and time; me and her and the wounded little kids we once were and always will be.
Maybe people think love is a lie because they think love is the cheat code that lets you play life in God mode. No cliff too steep, no pit too wide, no boss too powerful. But love isn’t like that at all. I mean, it maybe feels like that for a minute, but nabbing a Super Star on level 1-1 doesn’t make you invincible for life. Love isn’t a sackful of healing potions either. Love is more of an amulet you pick up off a slain wizard you were lucky enough to trip over in a haunted forest, the kind that works like: when you’re about to experience a deathblow, the amulet shatters and fills up your health bar juuuust enough for you to get the fuck out of there alive.
The Apostle Paul said love never fails. He was wrong about that. (He was wrong about a lot of things.) Love doesn’t win every battle, but it’s how we fight the darkness and it’s why we fight the darkness. Love is a promise tucked into your armor: a little bit of hope, that talisman against your heart; the whisper of a future.
“Is Love a Lie? Our Staff Weighs In” -Heather (Autostraddle)
