The following entry was written by Margalit of Outta My Mind With Worry

I think we can all write about the overwhelming love we feel for our children and for our partners, if we are fortunate enough to have them. Many people can speak of the undying love they feel for their friends and their families. More of us might want to discuss the love we have for our furbabies, those pets that cuddle with us when we're tired and just need something to hug. But for me, when I thought abouf this topic of love, most of those scenarios of love seemed kind of pedantic. I've been writing about how much I love my kids for over 13 years now. There's not all that much more I can say other than that every day I am fortunate enough to spend with them is a blessing I often feel unworthy to recieve.

What I want to talk about is the absence of love. What it feels like to be in a family and know that you're not loved. What kind of scars being unloved can bring, lifelong tics that you can't quite shed no matter how much therapy you've had, how much your partner and your children love you now, and how much love you expend towards your children and partner. I have experienced this first hand, and I know what an absence of love feel like. It's one of those dirty little secrets that some families hold dear,that a child not only wasn't favored, but wasn't wanted and
wasn't loved. Now, I don't mean to be morose on Valentines Day, that day set aside for the worship of love. But I do want to acknowledge that sometimes, in a family, there is a child that doesn't fit. There might be a plethora of reasons why, and none of those really matter in the end. What does matter is that a child who isn't loved in a family knows this from her earliest memories. In my own case, I've known since I was around 5 that there was something different in the way my parents treated my male siblings and how they treated me. There was a scorn that was poured down upon me from my parents, like there was something terribly wrong with me. I was clumsy, I was chubby, I was stupid, I was ugly, I was an underachiever, I was a late bloomer, I was all the negatives they could come up with. Everything about me was a burden to my parents. And yet, miraculously, even though I knew that they never liked me, and as I grew older knew that I was terribly unwanted, I still loved them. The love of an abused child, perhaps, but one that kept hoping against hope that someday they would see something in me that would spark some kind of love for me.

What is it that makes a child love their parents regardless of how badly they are treated? What makes children so desperate for love from their parents, even when their parents are incapable of returning love to them? Years of therapy can be spent to try and find out the answers to these questions, and yet the answer is simple: children deserved to be loved and they know in their hearts that their parents, even when they are deficient of human emotions, should love them. They have expectations from infancy that there is someone that will care for them, and protect them, and love them unconditionally. But love can be conditional, no matter how much you expect otherwise. For many kids, excuses for their parents can be made. My dad is an alcoholic, my mom is a drug addict, my mother is a workaholic, my father left before I was born. In my case, none of those things were true. My parents
were regular suburban folks, people absolutely incapable of loving their daughters. If we had been born in China or India, my parents would have practiced infanticide. But we lived in Los Angeles and killing your daughters was frowned upon. So I grew up in a vacuum of parental apathy, watching my friends have a different relationship with their families and wondering if there was any such reality as June and Ward Cleaver.

When I was 28 I gave up. Nothing I could do would change the way my parents felt towards me, and there was just no reason to keep trying. I just stopped calling, and I never heard from them again. It's been 26 years now since I've had any contact with them, and in that time my father died. I didn't attend the funeral, and in a final slap, when I looked up his obituary online, I saw that he was only survived by my brothers. The man had cut my sister and I completely from his heart, just as he had done when I was a child.

I tell my children every day, sometimes 5 or 6 times a day how much I love them. I can't say it enough. We even have a joke about it. I'll say, "Did I tell you that I loved you today?" and they'll moan "Yes, mom" and I'll say, "Well, I was lying!" and we'll all laugh. There is no doubt in their minds that they are loved beyond anything I could ever imagine. I moved beyond the loveless life I had as a child, but the wounds from being unloved will always linger.