First Comes Love

You remember the nursery rhyme, don’t you?

Boy and Girl, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.

As a romance writer, I find that echoes in my head sometimes while I’m sitting at my computer designing struggles for my fictitious couples to have to overcome. (It’s one of the things that inspired my latest series, which is women’s fiction not romance, and deals with the lack of the baby in the baby carriage.) And I still chuckle at the great horror and disgust that I would put into my sing-song-y voice while spelling kissing. I mean, really…can you imagine anything more disgusting?

Yeah…sometimes I’m really glad we grow out of our elementary school years!

As I was thinking about this post and casting about desperately for ideas, that nursery rhyme popped into my head. Then I double checked the date and – to quote my favorite movie villain – “Lightbulb!” Because, you see, we’re very close to Mother’s Day (it’s Sunday, make sure you get your mom a card!), and in addition to being that third part of the nursery rhyme, the word “mom”, to me, embodies the idea of love.

I’m very blessed to have come from a family full of love. My parents will be celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary in June. And while I can’t say they never fight, I don’t really think I’d want to. I learned so much about how to love, and how to be married, from watching them fight and then resolve their differences. It taught me that love isn’t just that squishy warm feeling, but something we choose to do. And we choose it as many times a day as we have to. Some days, it’s an easy choice. Other days…well, other days you just keep choosing it til it sticks. Or it’s bedtime. (Then you start choosing it again when you wake up the next day.)

But a mother’s love is different. It’s that secure, comforting love. The one that makes skinned knees and broken hearts stop hurting for at least a few minutes. The one that eases homesickness when you’re at camp, or college. The one that lets you know that you’re going to get through it. Whatever “it” is.

It’s only since I became a mom myself that I realized that sometimes even moms have to choose love. In those times when the house is an explosion of toys, dinner is boiling over on the stove, someone’s screaming about someone else taking a toy, and my head feels like there’s an ice pick being hammered into it, I look at the little creatures running around masquerading as boys and I choose love, just like my mom did. And her mom did.

And hopefully just like your mom did for you.

Elizabeth Maddrey (292 Posts)

Elizabeth Maddrey is a semi-reformed computer geek and homeschooling mother of two who lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C. When she isn’t writing, Elizabeth is a voracious consumer of books. She loves to write about Christians who struggle through their lives, dealing with sin and receiving God’s grace on their way to their own romantic happily ever after.