"With You" Celebrating... | Aunt Jeanette & Uncle Chuck
I shared at the end of my piece, “With You,” that I’ll be celebrating over the next several weeks stories of the lovely and wonderful folks who, in being practitioners of deep and amazing love:
Have most inspired and empowered me to accept and love myself.
And also to love one another more fully.
This celebration is inspired by what I consider in the song to be Movement One: Those Who Live Love So Fully That They Inspire Me to Love:
When I'm with you, I hear a sound
That makes me laugh and smile and sing to you
When I'm with you, I feel so free
I love that love is going to take control of me….
When I'm with you
It's for real
What I feel
When I'm with you, uh-huh
To Uncle Chuck and Aunt Jeanette,
Who are the folks who taught me what Love actually looks like, and so I’ve always known loved me—because you love everyone. Even if you don’t like how they are, you love and care about everyone.
At my best of drinking my water and minding my business, I’m fairly certain I’ve adopted my demeanor of gracious ire and, “I just don’t understand why they would do that???” from Aunt Jeanette. And my demeanor of, “Imma shake my head and gone,” from Uncle Chuck.
When I was 9, I was so greedy to feel Loved, truly seen and accepted somewhere, not just counted among the many and sat in a corner, that I loved seeing you for any and every reason. Saturdays at the gym with Uncle Chuck or gardening with Aunt Jeanette—I’m kind of lazy and maybe hated both at the beginning. But I love both of you so much. And any time with you, learning what love is, is beautiful time lived.
By the time I was 14, I remember constantly thinking, “I hope when I grow up that I Love people like Aunt Jeanette and Uncle Chuck do.” That folks know that we get to be whole persons, that we won’t be thrown away or cast aside because someone is displeased with us.
More, that folks know that we are desired for who we are. Because Love seeks and receives us for the whole of who we are.
You didn’t go to bat for me to be able to pursue what I believed was my next step in life—you went to war. And everyday of my life since—nearly 20 years—I can look around and concretely experience and name how you believing in me being the person to best know who I am has made it possible in so many ways for me to be who and where I am throughout my life.
Any time I feel like I have a moment I feel like I can’t do something, I know—“If it’s yours to do, Uncle Chuck and Aunt Jeanette believe that you can. So…you can.” Can’t nobody tell me nothing! Because they will have to face off with the Uncle Chuck and Aunt Jeanette in my head who say over and over again, “Well, we believe in her, and we’re pretty sure she can do it.” I can do all things I’m called to do through Uncle Chuck and Aunt Jeanette saying, “Yes, she can.” So I do!
Because the biggest war you didn’t know that you were helping me fight…just because you love so deeply and so fully and so well…was letting me know that it’s more than “okay” for me to be me.
Being me is why I’m here. And you will always be in my corner for me.
Thank you for loving me, and teaching me to love, just in being you. I for real think Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” when I think of you. The whole song, every lyric. And most salient and holding:
You’re the one held me up
Never let me fall
You’re the one who saw me through
Through it all…
I was blessed because I was love you…
I’m everything thing I am because you loved me.