Love is not buying children sweets.
Love is not humiliation, expectations, demands placed on the father.
Love is not telling a child what to do, what to be.
Love is not vain toys, entertainment.
Love is providing a space in which
a child can be themselves.
Be a child.
Not fight, not flee.
Not hear:
This is safe.
This is dangerous.
Not grow up in a world constantly defined, designed by someone else’s fear.
Love is creating a world, a space that is safe, convenient, comfortable.
A smokescreen is not love.
It is a smokescreen.
You will give the child money, or you yourself will buy everything with that money.
But what of it?
Since everywhere — danger, prohibitions, commands.
And now, dear parent.
Especially you, woman, who most often spends the most time with her own child.
How much love have you given your child?
How much love have you given other children?
How much love have you given the world?
No one here is asking about vanity.
Pretty objects.
Tasty food.
The question concerns a space in which
a child can be a child.
A child can feel itself within love.
How much, woman, how much?
A woman can call anything love that she herself imagines as love.
Under the name of love,
a woman justifies:
Family.
Marriage.
Work.
Sacrifice.
Enduring.
Giving oneself up.
Protection.
Earning.
Building a home.
Remaining in a relationship.
Surrendering one’s own direction.
Without the word “love,” many of these obligations would look like ordinary subordination.
But when they are called love, a man begins to believe that resisting them would mean:
Selfishness.
Immaturity.
Irresponsibility.
Hurting a woman.
Hurting a child.
Failing as a man.
Ideology is ideology.
Reality is reality.