About Love

How the countless tiny impressions of family life shape the evolution of love, touch, and communication.

BY RANDI MILLER

---

“We learn about love in childhood. Whether our homes are happy or troubled, our families functional or dysfunctional, it’s the original school of love.”

                                                                                                -All About Love, Bell Hooks

---

Family

I grow up in a quiet house, in a snowy east coast city. There’s no fighting, except my younger brother and I who bicker endlessly anytime we breath the same air. At breakfast, we each sit at the counter on our own stools. The stools are identical—blond wood with flat round tops and four spindled legs—although the grain of my seat displays a paisley-shaped blemish. When my mother’s back is turned, my brother places his foot on the rung of my stool. I kick it off. Things escalate. My mother finally makes a rule: no speaking to each other at mealtime.

Mealtime

Every night my father comes home at six, and the four of us eat a home-cooked dinner my mother has prepared. From my seat I can see the spinning dial on our oven’s clock. At six-thirty, we’re done. After dinner, everyone retreats to their bedrooms. My mother watches television. I do homework. My brother plays. My father drives back to his office to finish the day’s charting. The kitchen is dark.

Care

When I’m born via C-section, my father is a graduate student in an orthodontics program at the University of Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country from where he and my mother were raised. My grandmother flies three thousand miles to help her daughter with me, the newborn. When she arrives, my grandmother isn’t much help. My mother asks why she doesn’t know anything about caring for babies. My grandmother responds, “because I had a baby nurse for all three kids!”

Mealtime

In my mother’s house, growing up, she and my aunt Sandy eat dinner together before their father, my grandfather, arrives home from work. My uncle Archie, the youngest of the three and the only boy, prefers to eat alone in front of the television. When they’re finished, my mother washes the dishes, my aunt dries. My uncle doesn’t have chores. After the kids have retreated to their bedrooms, my grandmother and grandfather eat by themselves—a home-cooked meal my grandmother has prepared.

Routines

After school, from four o’clock to six o’clock every afternoon, I watch reruns of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Three’s Company, and Soap. Dinner is always at six. Sometimes, after dinner, I watch MASH, Taxi, Alice, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, All in The Family, Family Ties, Different Strokes. When I watch The Facts of Life, I wonder if Tootie, Blair, Natalie and Jo feel lonely living at boarding school, with only Mrs. Garrett to care for them.

Genetics

Like my father, I’m lanky and bird-boned, with sloping shoulders, round eyes, and chicken legs. My mother is more muscular, thicker, strong. She’s the one you hand the peanut butter jar to when it needs opening. We all have brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin—except my brother, whose hair, unexpectedly, is dirty blond, and whose eyes are blue.

Communication

When we’re young, my brother and I hear the phrase, buzz off a lot. Sometimes, more light-heartedly, my mother says, cling free! I think this second one is funnier because it’s the name of the fabric softener sheets I see advertised on television. When my brother and I push my mother to the edge with our bickering, she raises her hand in the air as if to smack us. She never lowers it. As we get older, we laugh when her hand goes up.

Routines

As a child at bedtime, I lie beneath my rust-colored comforter in my rust-colored room and wait for my mother to arrive. Every night she sits on the edge of my bed and leans over me, placing a hand firmly on either side of my body. She bounces the bed gently—1—2—3—4—5—6 times. She counts out loud. I count in my head.

Touch

When I’m ten, my favorite babysitter is Mandy—the teenage daughter of our neighbors—with long blond hair and large white teeth. Saturday nights she tickles my back while we watch The Love Boat, and I tickle hers while we watch Fantasy Island. Two hours feels like no time at all.

Habits

The year I turn twelve, at eight-thirty each weeknight my father shouts, “Who wants pizza?” I join him for the drive along Decarie Boulevard to pick up an all-dressed pie from Tasty Food. He and I develop the ritual of sharing it at the kitchen table. He tells me about a place called California—far away, but warm. Later that year, the doctor tells my mother I’ve gained fifteen pounds. My mother makes a new rule—the kitchen is closed after dinner, lights out. I lose the weight and develop the habit of never eating after dinner. To this day, it’s one of the greatest gifts my mother has given me.

Routine

In my teens, I accompany my father to his office, sometimes in the evenings after dinner, sometimes on weekends. He teaches me how to mold dental impressions by wetting the white chalky plaster and pressing it against a spinning wheel. Absorbed in the work, I study how the hard edges soften, shaped by the intensity or delicacy of my pressure. I also I help him with his billing, which is how I learn that he treats people for free if they can’t afford orthodontics.

Communication

In my late teens, my mother and I go clothes shopping—an activity I’m not very good at. Feeling lost, I trail behind her as she browses through the racks.  After many minutes of this, she finally says, “Stop following me.”

Affection

In my twenties, I move to California. My parents visit and we road trip to Portland—the city in which I was born but have never seen. At the end of the trip, I take a chance and say, I love you. Days later, my mother calls, concerned something is wrong.

Touch

In preparation for the birth of my daughter, I read books. One is a book about massaging your baby to help her feel relaxed. I study the strokes and methods. After she’s born, I’m eager to try it. Any time I massage her, she cries.

Affection

During my late twenties, my grandmother is in her eighties. I read a book called If I Had My Life to Live Over, I Would Pick More Daisies. One day, I work up the courage to ask her, would she do anything differently? I hesitate before asking, because in my family we don’t ask these kinds of questions. My grandmother replies that no, she has no regrets. Then, upon further consideration, says, “actually, I would be more affectionate. I wish I could have been more affectionate, but I couldn’t.”

Genetics

When my daughter is born via C-section, she looks nothing like me. She has strawberry blond whisps and pale skin, a retruded chin, and fuzz on her shoulders. As they sew me up, I think, this is not at all what I thought my child would look like, before they take her away to clean her.

Care

When each of my kids is born, my parents fly three thousand miles to be with me. Both times they stay with us for two weeks, driving across town in search of preemie diapers, bottle nipples, burp cloths—anything I need. They even do special grocery runs for the baby nurse, who craves a never-ending assortment of late-night-snacks.

Communication

As a toddler, anytime my daughter is upset, I climb inside the canopy of her bed and ask about her feelings. I don’t want her to feel uncared for. I ply and ply, but she never wants to talk. In desperation, I call for my husband, who reaches for the white washcloth puppet with long ears, pink nose, and black threaded eyes. He flops the bunny’s ears forward over its eyes, gently bumping his hand, over and over, into my daughter’s sandy curls. Laughter erupts as the bunny stumbles blindly. There is no part of me that would have thought of this, and even if I tried, it wouldn’t be funny.

Care

Throughout first grade, a boy named Neil whispers in my ear, “I’m going to kill you at recess.” I spend recesses terrified, hiding in the girl’s bathroom with Shauna Kovshoff. When I ask my mother to come to school so I can play in the yard, she does. When I recall this moment as an adult, I remember the terror. When my mother recalls this moment, she laughs, “Remember when I had to stand in the yard like a moron?!”

Communication

One summer afternoon, in my late thirties, we enjoy a family day in my brother’s backyard. My mother watches as her four grandchildren jump in and out of the pool, running over to give us hugs. As each kid finds a toy, my brother notices that my son, the only boy, looks sad because he doesn’t have one. My brother springs up and passes my son a ball. That same day, out of the blue, my mother says to my brother and me, “You guys did it right. I wish we had done it like you. We weren’t friends with our kids.” She says, “We had separate lives. We took care of you. The way you guys do it is better.” 

Habits

During my children’s teen years, I talk about making nutritious choices, so our bodies feel energized and have what they need to thrive. I’m careful not to focus on bodyweight in relation to food. Later, my daughter tells her therapist that she feels shame for three days every time she eats sugar. My son, an athlete, says it’s one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given him.

Genetics

When my son reaches his late teens he looks more and more like my brother—six-foot-one with dirty blond hair and thin lips that seem to always be stifling a smile. He’s charming and fun-loving and knows how to get by doing the least amount of work. When my son and my brother are in the same room, I sometimes mix up their names.

Communication

When my daughter is in her early twenties, we walk along a country road. The hill sections are steep, so we pause at the tops to catch our breath. On the way back, we fall into a meditative silence. Climbing, she drops back, and I notice her trailing close behind. I begin to weave a zigzag pattern across a tire track in the gravel. Unknowingly, she zigzags behind me. After many minutes of this, I say. “You’re like a little duckling.” She looks up, and laughs.

Care

In my forties, I become a health coach. I spend days helping clients build habits based on nutrition, sleep, fitness, and stress management—all with the goal of reducing or eliminating their suffering. One day, I recommend that my mother take a daily walk to improve her recent forgetfulness. “None of that matters,” my mother insists. “It’s all genetic.”

Genetics

Ten years after my father has passed, my brother texts my mother and me a photo of himself. He doesn’t have to say why—he looks exactly like my father; six-foot-one, round eyes, and thin lips that seem to always be stifling a smile.

Family

My son is twenty-one now. “Remember when I was little,” he says, “and you used to tickle my back at bedtime? I loved that.”  

My daughter is twenty-four. If something’s bothering her, she’ll often confide in me, when she’s ready.

My husband says, “Aren’t you happy you have the kind of relationship you wanted with your children?”

“Yes, I am,” I say.

Still, I think of all those impressions, deliberate and careless, that have begun the work of shaping my children’s edges; each one a precious force, each one a lesson.

---