LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Sophia Efthimiatou!

Love them for their scars

Oh, family, have we got an edition for you today. We’re going for it.

The subject this week is parents, and our changing relationship with them.

Wait, don’t go!

There is room here for all of us, I promise — for those of us who’ve had an easy time within our “families of origin,” for those of us who carry a lingering pain, those trying to find mercy and patience and understanding, and of course those of us who want nothing to do with this topic — for this practice is bigger than one week’s theme, and our lens is wide.

Lizzy with parents, and goats and a duck . . .

Our guest this week — the person ultimately responsible for the birth of this Substack! — is

Sophia Efthimiatou

, an all-around guru at Substack who reached out to me a couple of years ago to suggest that I come on board. As you’ll see from her letter, Sophia is also a deeply feeling and kind, generous human whose letter cracks open a window into familial love and its infinite forms.

Though there are wild differences in the specifics, there are also some universals about family that hold true for us all: we are born completely defenseless and without agency. We require caring for. In order for us to survive, someone else had to meet our basic needs for at least a few years. And those people, if they are still alive, age and change and may themselves need to be cared for — physically, emotionally, materially. The sad truth is that the people who minister to our early vulnerability may later develop their own, before, as Sophia puts it, “they will be lost in the great waves of time, and nobody will know them or remember them.”

So a nice, light topic for us this Sunday!

I am deeply proud of Sophia because she did the assignment perfectly, because she did it spontaneously — and I want to remind you what this letter-writing practice is not: it’s not a showcase for our writing skills, it’s not a piece of craft, it’s not something to workshop or labor over. When you can truly tap into the spirit of unconditional love, as Sophia did, it’s a somewhat primal and surprising experience. It’s heart-centered, not brain-centered. And it should not take more than a few minutes!

So thank you and brava to our Sophia for leading the way — and wishing you all a beautiful week ahead!

Love,

Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know today about my parents?

My child, who is also their child, don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to love them, as you do. I want you to set aside the thing that is sometimes called “family dynamics” — or might also be called the “context” in which they exist, and in which you have always struggled to find safety and security and truth. All the other involved parties, with all their opinions, resentments, views of things — set them all aside. Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.

You get to have your own relationship with your mother and father. You get to have your own feelings of love and appreciation for them, no matter how anyone else perceives them. You even get to have your own relationship with each of them separately and independently of the other.

You get to love them. You get to enjoy them. You can have this, no matter what anyone else thinks of them. No matter what even some parts of YOU think of them. You get to love them, because you do love them.

Here is what you cannot do, though — you cannot want them to take care of you or protect you. That is no longer their job, and as they themselves would be the first to admit, they excused themselves from that job a long, long, long time ago — far, far longer ago than you wanted them to.

You were told — you were taught at a very early age — to take care of yourself, far earlier than you felt you were ready to, and this remains a sort of primal wound for you.

You were told, “You are on your own” — and those words still can make you feel at times like a cold wind is blowing through your heart.

But your parents did not say these words out of neglect; they said these words out of a ferocious sort of love, a wild and tumultuous animal kind of love, a love shot through with stone cold terror at what the world would do to you if you did not learn to take care of yourself.

And I will tell you this: had they not loved you in this hard, pushing-away sort of manner, you would never have become yourself. You would never have needed to go hunting for me, and we would not be here today having this conversation together, or sharing this magic with thousands of people. And you would never have become the writer that you are, or the seeker of God that you are, or the traveler that you are, or the lover of humanity that you are, or the person who walks around the world literally handing strangers stickers that say YOU ARE LOVED, and watching those people intuitively start to cry because of how desperately they need to hear it — and you KNOW how desperately everyone needs to hear it.

Lizzy, if your mother and father had loved you exactly the way you wanted them to love you, they would have ruined you — and they would have ruined who you needed to become. And it doesn’t matter whether or not they knew this, or whether they did it intentionally or out of a place of their own hunger or damage. We know this. We know this. We know that it had to be exactly the way it was, or you could not be who you are. Who we needed you to be.

But let us set aside how you parents loved you. Let us talk about how you love them. How you have always loved them. The long walks with your father, and his heart-softness and his tears that spill over so many things. The enthusiasm and excitement of your mother over the smallest of wonders. Their strange physical power. Their incredible resourcefulness and ferocious self-reliance. Their humor. Their emotional fragility, which you saw as a young child and always wanted to protect — and it doesn’t matter, Lizzy, it doesn’t matter if that should have been your job or not. You cannot help that you saw their emotional fragility and their overwhelm and their fear and that you wanted to protect them, surround them with softness, and keep them safe. You still want that. And, as much as it is possible to do so, you WILL protect them and surround them with softness and keep them safe as time goes by. Because now you also know how to do this for yourself. That’s what matters. And so you have capacity. You have capacity to love you, to love them, to love others. Wherever you can, as the years go by — no matter how many years there are — you will, as best as you can, keep them safe.

Have your own story with your parents now, child. Let it be the true story, the story of your heart. Dismiss anyone else’s opinions about this, about them, about you. Let your heart be honest with itself about the true love you have for them. It is a real love.

It is okay to love them as much as you do. It is accurate. And it is nobody else’s business but yours. Because it is your love. Yours alone.

And we will hold you through every heartbreaking and tender moment of it. We always have.

We’ve got you, and we’ve got them.

Prompt

As I hope is obvious in this space, there is absolutely no need to join this exercise if it triggers you to reflect on your relationship with your parents. Of course. And if it doesn’t feel right for you, it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t feel good. Just skip it, knowing that you’re not being graded, and use the old reliable question: Dear Love, what would you have me know today?

If you would like to contemplate our subject this week, then you can use this question (or tailor it to include the parental figures in your life): Dear Love, what would you have me know about my parents?