Of giving trees, love, and happiness

Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.

Kahlil Gibran

One of my favorite books ever is “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. I liked it intuitively, with my heart, the very first time I read it and every time since. I just can’t get my brain around it, and when I try to I am perplexed by it and I start to hate it. The book is about relationships, love, and generosity, and it challenges my intellectual understanding of those terms. I just can’t grasp why someone would choose to love in such a way that the most natural thing to do would be to give all of one’s fruits, comforts, and strengths. To give oneself to the other so totally that only one’s roots would be left! And then to be happy like that? Absurd!

I’ve always considered myself as a person with a generous heart, but when I was accused early on of being a martyr I decided to strive for a healthy balance so I could never be accused of that again. To keep my roots I needed to love and be generous. I was raised to be a good girl and I’m proud of that, yet life has taught me some very painful lessons on self esteem, assertiveness, codependence, and enabling which have brought me closer to the true strength of my roots.

As a mother of a large family and wife of a workaholic, I lived to be a “Giving Tree”. I dedicated all my gifts and talents, my time, and my energy to the happiness and well-being of my family. Not that it was ever a perfectly happy family, God knows there were plenty of shortcomings and mistakes on my part and plenty of frustrations and tears for everyone, but I gave 200% percent and that was a great source of pride for me. My family was often happy and I was proud of my work and faithfulness, but I was not happy. I could not see a correlation between selfless, faithful love and happiness.

And then today I saw the quote above and I began to understand the parable of the Giving Tree a little better. It is not what you give, how much, for how long, how much pain one endures, or even what is left of one’s self that is important. It is the quality of the gift, the purity of the generosity with which it is given. It is not martyrdom that is required to demonstrate true love; it is a generosity of spirit that allows us to look into the deep, scary, empty, and lonely places of our soul and find a few crumbs of joy, of security, of hope, and then gives us the courage to share with the beloved that which we have the greatest need of. It is truly paradoxical, a contradiction in terms, a parable that breaks all our preconceived notions of truth and righteousness. It cannot be understood with our mind or practiced through sheer strength of body and will. It comes from the heart, can only be apprehended through a clean and brave heart, will only succeed if it is totally heartfelt and full of love.

So this is the secret of my unhappy marriage: giving from the wrong source, loving with our minds, being generous with what we had plenty of. Will we have the courage to take the first step and dig deep into the lonely, scary, deprived places of our lives and souls? Will we dare face our hungers and scarcities? Will we find the strength to change how we love? Will a year be long enough to learn our lesson? We might even be happy if we did!