When we were kids, my brother and I used to compete to be the favorite child. As adults, it became a kind of running joke: which of us did Mom love more?
Of course, it was an unanswerable question: love is not something that can be measured in pounds and ounces, nor quantified.
At least it wasn’t until a recent study in Finland attempted to do just that and concluded that parental love trumps romantic love.
Researchers measured brain activity when people were asked to imagine stories involving love (for pets, partners, strangers, friends, nature and children) and love for children apparently outperformed romantic love.
But does it? In fact?
Before them, there was us, writes Anonymous. Without us there would be no them. And without a healthy and happy us, I don’t think there can be a happy and healthy them.
I mean, we’ve all heard the clichés. Mothers who say “you can never truly know love until you have a child”; husbands who complain that the moment their wives gave birth, they fell down the pecking order. And now, apparently, there’s science that tells us it’s true.
Well, from my point of view it is not. And although admitting it is an absolute taboo, I am sure that I am not the only woman who feels this way. I do not love my children more than I love my husband.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore my daughters, Holly, three, and Isabella, one, obviously. And I am a good mother to them. They lack nothing, emotionally or physically, and they are happy, well-adjusted children.
But if I had to sum up what I feel for them in one word, it wouldn’t be “love” but “duty.”
They are helpless, absolutely incapable of taking care of themselves, and I have a responsibility towards them that I will never shirk, even if, at times, I don’t like it very much.
I’m the first to admit that this may change as they get older, but the early years of motherhood are undeniably arduous. When they’re little, your kids take things from you and give you very little in return.
What takes mine away? In varying proportions: my time, my career, my freedom, my spontaneity, my body (I used to be thin, a size 10, two pregnancies have left me with a belly that I can’t seem to get rid of with exercise or healthy eating) and, perhaps most importantly, they take me away from the love of my life, my husband, Nick.
Despite what others say, I don’t think this is what’s best for me, for him, or for our daughters.
Before them, there was us. Without us, there would be no them. And without a healthy and happy us, I don’t think there can be a happy and healthy them.
We were together for six years before Holly came along. Six years where I felt like the luckiest woman in the world to have found this man who was just like me. He made me laugh, he challenged me, he shared my passions, my hopes and my dreams, he made me want to be the best version of myself I could be.
She still does, or at least she would if we could spend some time together that didn’t involve discussing the logistics of childcare, potty training, and where in the house Isabella might have hidden one of her shoes.
Curiously, searching for lost shoes and cleaning the floor under a high chair did not appear among the parenting vignettes that Finnish researchers asked their subjects to imagine while measuring their feelings of love.
As I look through the study, I find that the scientists’ scenes read like pastiches of motherhood: the moment you first see your newborn child, your child running toward you in a sunny meadow, your child graduating from high school, your child turning to you and smiling.
Nowhere is the time when your child screamed for 45 minutes straight because he didn’t want to sit in the car.
Nor is there any mention of the tantrum on the floor face down because you put the milk in the wrong glass, the endless hours spent reading the same Julia Donaldson book over and over (and over again), the daily battle to get them to brush their teeth.
I can’t believe a parent could imagine those scenarios and still find the “love” neurons firing in their brain. In contrast, the scenarios dealing with romantic love weren’t all candlelit dinners, although that one was there.
They were mundane things like watching your partner put on a shirt or load the laundry.
The idea that your children should be the love of your life is very reductionist. It resorts to the patriarchal and trite idea that a woman is not really a woman until she is a mother. Something that I find very offensive.
Where does this leave people who by choice or situation are not parents?
I spent a long time without being a mother, and I always hated the condescending rhetoric that told me I couldn’t truly understand love (or exhaustion) until I had kids. And frankly, I don’t think that’s true.
I also don’t think you can expect a love to last unless you invest time and effort into the relationship.
So even though I scoffed at the idea of ”date nights” before we had kids, I make sure that one night a week we get a babysitter and go out, trying to remember the people we were before we got swallowed up by our daughters’ needs and wants.
I want girls to see what romantic love is like too.
I want to model for them a relationship that isn’t a fairy tale, but an aspiration, and I want them to know that they don’t need to have children to experience true love.
Another important ambition: When our daughters leave home, I want to continue to have a relationship that is based on more than just co-parenting. Because what happens if you spend 18 or 20 years focusing on your children at the expense of your partner?
Yes, part of the reason I fell in love with Nick was because I thought he would be a good father, and he is, but I don’t want to spend our old age living vicariously through our children.
I want us to continue to feel excited and inspired by each other. I want to experience more of the years we spent traveling the world, sleeping peacefully in far-flung hotel rooms, and exploring the culture and food of historic cities.
I want to spend hours debating politics and discussing plays over a bottle of wine. How can I hope to have any of that if we lose ourselves in just being mom and dad?
We will always love our children unconditionally, but they don’t have to be the only love story that defines our lives.