“Here there be monsters.”

There is fierceness to your love as a parent, a primordial viciousness that cannot quite be captured by pen or by page. The heat of it feeds you, moves you to the force of living that must be done to rear a child, to create a life.

But it tears at you too, this animal of passion, and the thing that tears deepest is that the one you love so fiercely–this child of womb or of heart–cannot understand this beast, cannot capture it in their reality, or even in their imagination. And you know, in spite of this longing to make sure they know, that they aren’t meant to, aren’t intended to. This kind of knowing is not expected of them.

So this tears then too, this absolute inability to communicate the sheer volume of heartache held for them, the rawness of the love which bears them into existence.

And when the child is not your own and you must live into a place that is not-parent, but rather mentor, or friend, or some indefinable something else–where then does this animal go to dwell? And where does the fierce protectionism burn when the child grows older, finds wings on which to lift away? Where does that energy live, when the cage you’ve built in your heart is no longer large enough to contain its nervous pacing, when there is not enough flesh to keep it fed?

Should there not be a guide book for this wild adventure? A star chart or a river guide? Should there not be an ancient map, a gilt compass, moss on the north of the tree? How do you find your footing when you dwell on the edge of love’s fierce map?