Love Is Your Birthright

It happened in the bath. Somehow, as I soaked and sobbed, I heard it clearly.

“Love is your birthright.”

In an act of faith I accepted this mantra from my soul as truth and repeated it a hundred times.

Love is my birthright. Love is my birthright.

I left the family Christmas party earlier that day holding in the tears until I could get to my car...until I could get my daughter buckled into her car seat. I held it together until she fell asleep.

Then the hot, searing pain of abandonment tore through me. It eviscerated every excuse I made in order to keep the pain at bay... in order to pretend that I wasn’t an outsider in my own family. Every acidic story I used to blame myself and give them the benefit of the doubt burned through me as I drove home.

I was so grateful that my daughter stayed asleep as I transferred her from the car to her bed. I needed a healing bath. I needed to let the rest of the pain seep out of me. I needed to pull the plug and watch it swirl down the drain.

I didn’t expect to be transformed that day. I didn’t expect to feel my soul rise with such abundant love...for me. But that is exactly what happened.

Love is my birthright.

Love is my birthright.

Love is my birthright.

Exhausted from decades of smiling and turning the other cheek, I surrendered. I saw that trying to earn Love by being good enough, nice enough, forgiving enough would never work.

The kind of Love I’m talking about isn’t granted from someone else.

Love is simply, innately, my birthright.

Over the years, as I let this truth sink in to the fertile soil of my life, and felt my soul rooting more and more deeply in it, I came to understand that not only is Love my birthright, but Love is the birthing spark and the sustaining fire of my entire being.

And the same is true of you.

Love is your birthright, too.