When all you have is love...
LOVE PHILOTEKNOS Danièle Starenkyj©2016 www.publicationsorion.com
Greek was able to express love in several words – admittedly, I was stumped on the themes and versions of this dead language, but I don't regret it, now that I can still read certain documents and recognize the words I'm looking for. So yes, there are:
Agape love , transcendent love, which loves even one's enemy; phileô love , which loves with friendship the one who deserves to be loved; eros love , which desires the beauty and goodness of the other for oneself; stergein love , which is parental love made of endurance and resignation; and philoteknos love , or maternal love, that unique love which gives the mother a profound joy in being and remaining with her child, in keeping him close to her, in responding eagerly to his needs.
This particular maternal love, whether short or prolonged, imprints in the brain of her baby "the gene" of happiness, the one which builds resilience, this capacity to find deep in our memories, even our faded memories, the smile, the caress, the tender word which will allow us to bounce back when life has been cruel to us 1 .
My grandchildren love to play in my office. There, right next to my desk, I set up their little table with small chairs and a shelf with watercolors and brushes, coloring pencils, drawing paper, coloring books, scissors for cutting, etc.
They know they can bother me as much as they want, and confident that I will answer their questions, they hardly bother me! One day, noticing all my books and documents piled up, they asked me if I had enjoyed going to school. "Yes," I replied, "I went to school from the second day of my life. That's why Grandma never stopped studying, and she won't stop doing so." Totally incredulous, they peppered me with questions.
And yet, it's true. My mother was a teacher. While pregnant with me, she continued to teach in a small, one-class, multi-grade school with about twenty students aged six to fourteen. (During a lecture tour in France, about thirty years ago, I met some of the big guys who had attended her, and they told me they had indelible memories of my mother, even though they owed her the discovery of their vocation.) Mother gave birth on a Saturday, a holiday at this school, and on Monday morning... I was at school too! She had placed me in a bassinet stored under her large old-fashioned schoolteacher's desk. As soon as she heard me make the slightest noise, she would take me in her arms, breastfeed me while continuing her work, then put me back under her desk. I stayed at school like that until the summer holidays. Ironically, my mother didn't question work-life balance. She did it spontaneously, simply, maternally—out of philoteknos love. And no one found fault with it.
The summer holidays were a perpetual joy for Mama. I read letters from her to my father, dated from that time. She was the woman most in love with her husband on earth, and I was the most wonderful little girl. Then in September, in the time it took to read a telegram, our lives changed dramatically. Her eldest daughter—Mama, a war widow with two children, had remarried my father for the second time—had just been shot in the face by her cousin, who had found the weapon in a bush and had been playing soldier. It was undoubtedly an accident, but Mama never got over it. I was abruptly weaned. My mother no longer had a drop of milk to offer me. Her loving smile, her sweet words, her closeness, disappeared and never returned.
For a long time, I thought I had invented them, until the day I realized that I hadn't; I was only pulling them from the depths of my memory, because love, and especially philoteknos love, never fades. It remains there, fertilizing the humus of our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts to give them, against all odds, the color of hope that does not deceive 2 .
And then, on the battlefield, the wounded soldier, as his life slips away from him, to ease his pain, calls out again: " Mother ."
May the love that can only spring from your heart, O mothers, never dry up.
Danièle Starenkyj©2016 www.publicationsorion.com
1. Cyrulnik B., Save yourself, life is calling you , Odile Jacob, 2012.
2. Starenkyj D., Reflections for a Better Life , Orion, 2015.
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