How much do I love you? I would ask… and my two fresh faced, blonde and freckled kiddos would giggle, look at each other and stretch their arms out, “this much and more,” they would respond. Oh, but no, I would say… I really mean it, “How much do I love you?” and they would giggle again and do their very best to stretch those arms even farther, the tips of their fingers touching the end of the universe and then, they would respond, even louder now, “THIS MUCH AND MORE!”
It was the summer of 2005, I was staying at my mom’s house and trying to decide what was next in my life. My relationship was ending, I knew that, it had to end. I was suffocating – dying while being alive and it was this moment, this summer to end it or to give up and give in. I was 31 years old and scared.
I had two precious beautiful babies, I lived in a foreign country and I suppose the scariest part was knowing how much their dad loved them and loved me. It was a destructive, messy love but it was love and with being loved comes the recognition that whatever you do as the recipient of such love, – whatever you do – whatever rock that you throw, barrier that you build – the ripples will reach far. But, leaving this relationship was one desperate last ditch act of love for myself. I couldn’t continue. The darkness on the other side was like the seeping, oozing tar in the tar pits. I remember as a child, our school taking a field trip to the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles and I later had nightmares remembering those poor animals stuck, desperate, gasping for their final breath before being sucked all the way down. This was me in the summer of 2005, desperate, whites of the eyes desperate, but I had two kids – two lovely, angelic, bubbling with happiness kids.
The contrast of our perceptions of reality didn’t allude me, it petrified me. I didn’t want to hurt them, I pleaded to God for the first time in my life, “please, please help me, don’t let me hurt them.” It was somewhere in this space of desperation that we invented the “this much and more” game. I think that I needed there to be something physical, a touchstone that would help me to know that they would be okay, that I would be okay. “How much do I love you?” I would ask and then just to be sure, “How much do you love me?” “This much and more!” they would erupt with glee and I would hold on to myself that this, this all enduring love to the end of the universe, would be enough to keep them safe.
As time passed and my little kids became teenagers, we kept up our game and although it might come with an eye roll and a sigh of exasperation, “this much and more” is still part of the fabric of our lives. For me, “this much and more” became a symbol of my choices in life. Choices to cherish those that I hold close, to give all that I have to whatever I do, and importantly, to love to the end of the universe, “this much and more!”