LOVE IS THE FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE THAT
BRINGS EVERYTHING TOGETHER; HATE DRIVES
EVERYTHING APART. LOVE IS THE GRAVITY
THAT UNITES US; HATE THE ANTIGRAVITY
THAT RIPS US ASUNDER.
When I was eight years old, my parents divorced, and my mother moved us from Los Angeles to Miami, where she could be closer to her own family. I was devastated by my family’s breakup and by the fact that my father was suddenly so far away. I would speak to him on the phone about once a week, and I would see him two or three times a year, mostly on Jewish holidays, when he flew to Miami. I felt distanced from him emotionally and geographically, but I wasn’t sure he felt the same way.
Many years later, however, I met a rabbi in Los Angeles, who told me a story about my father. “After your mother left, he would come to see me every week, and he was a living dead man,” the rabbi said. “He would sit and cry all day that his children were so far away from him, that his heart was broken, and that nothing he was doing really mattered anymore. Week after week, for years! I had never seen a man so crushed.”
As you might imagine, this was quite shocking to me. My father was a tough, Middle Eastern man, conditioned to show strength above all emotions. Since I wasn’t sure he missed me the way I missed him, I held my own feelings in check, and as a result of this misunderstanding we were not as close as we might have been. But when I learned about his true feelings from that rabbi, I made a genuine effort to narrow the distance between us. I realized that my father’s tough-mindedness would probably keep him from ever talking about his feelings, but since I now knew what was really in his heart I managed to get past it. Knowing that he loved me made me unafraid to love him back, and over the past few years we have become closer than ever. And my point is this: You need to show your children what is in your heart.
I never miss an opportunity to tell my children that I love them, and I often talk to them about the nature of love. I remember reading an article in the New York Times about the discovery of something called antigravity, a force of chaos in the universe, and I shared the article with my children. “Gravity keeps everything together, and antigravity creates chaos by tearing everything apart,” I told them. “That’s a very good metaphor for love and hate. Love is the force in the universe that brings everything together; hate drives everything apart. Love is the gravity that unites us; hate the antigravity that tears us asunder.”
I told my kids, “To the best of your ability, you have to increase the gravitational forces that draw people together. You have to ask yourself, ‘How can I be closer to other people? How do I show my love?’ Even when someone is mean to you, you have to learn to transcend it. Don’t become part of the negative forces in the universe because they undermine the very fabric of existence. Don’t join the forces of repulsion. Learn to win over the hearts of your enemies. The Talmud says, ‘Who is a great man? He who can make his enemies into friends.’”
It is critical to make your kids believe in love, especially if you’ve been divorced. Children of divorce tend to stop believing. They think they will wake up one morning and the sun won’t shine, or that the flowers won’t bloom in the spring. They are seriously rattled by divorce, because the two people whose union was responsible for their very existence have gone their separate ways.
I can almost always tell children of divorce or those from unhappy homes. They are generally more reserved and more cynical than other children, and early on they exhibit signs of hardness. These children begin to suspect that love is a myth. As they grow up, they find it challenging to extend themselves or to be selfless because they haven’t seen that type of behavior work in their own homes. Quite the contrary, they’ve seen it not work, and they have no reason to believe it will ever work for them. As they move toward adulthood, they are more likely to operate in a harsher reality. They believe that nice guys finish last, that no good deed goes unpunished, and that people are only altruistic when it suits them. A child without love feels abandoned and lost and very much alone in the world.
When I see those types of kids, it fills me with pain, and unfortunately I am seeing more and more of them every day. My children see them, too—they go to school with them, live across the street from them, socialize with them—and as a result we often find ourselves talking about the very nature of love. “Love is like karma,” I tell my kids. “What goes around comes around. Let me paraphrase from King Solomon: All relationships are like looking into a reflective pond. What you show others is what will be reflected back to you. If you show people love, it will be reciprocated. That is an axiomatic law of the universe: Love works.”
Part of believing in love is believing that there’s a common origin to all of humanity; and since we all come from the same place and are made of the same “stuff,” we can always find something in another person to relate to. “People want to love, people want to share love, people want to be close—that’s part of human nature. When they behave in a mean-spirited fashion, they’re being untrue to themselves. All we need to do is to remind them of their truer self. It goes back to what we always talk about in this house: listening to that inner voice.
“If you’re hurt, and especially if you’re hurt in love, you will condition yourself to ignore that voice, and you will stop believing, and I never want you to stop believing.”
A child who believes in love, who feels your love, knows that he will never be alone in the world.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates what I mean: A few summers ago, our three older kids went to sleepaway camp in the Catskills, and my wife Debbie took the younger kids to Australia to visit her parents. I was alone at home, working on my radio show, and at the end of two weeks I went to the Catskills for Visitor’s Day. I got up early in the morning and was the first parent there. When my daughters saw me, they were so excited that they ran over and smothered me with hugs and kisses. It was a very special moment: Their mother was ten thousand miles away, they had been without family for two whole weeks, and in that moment of complete openness they held nothing back.
We had a wonderful day. I had brought Chana’s little Maltese dog with me, and we went hiking and canoeing on the Delaware River, and then we had an early dinner and made our way back to camp. As we pulled into the parking lot, the girls became very emotional. Chana, who was eleven at the time, was holding her little dog as if her life depended on it. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she quietly asked me not to leave. It was really one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I took her aside and said, “Wherever I go, wherever you go, I’m always with you because my children are always the number one thing in my heart and mind. You guys are the center of my existence. My radar is on you at all times. You can always feel my love and my presence. I don’t go anywhere without you. You are always with me. You’re in camp because it’s a good experience for you, but your father is still with you. You never have to feel alone. There is nothing in my life and in the life of your mother that comes before you.”
Those words comforted her (more or less!). I had to pry her hands loose from the dog, but she eventually stopped crying, kissed me goodbye, and went back to camp.
Of course, things don’t always work out quite that smoothly. Sometimes I will speak to my kids from the bottom of my heart, and I can see that I’m not reaching them. They might smirk and roll their eyes. But I just keep going. I don’t accept it. I refuse to let it affect me. I will keep telling them I love them, even if they think I’m being schmaltzy, because I do love them and I want them to know it always.
Still, kids are going to push you away, particularly as they get older. They are trying to cut the umbilical cord, trying to assert their independence, and that’s fine, but you can’t let it stop you. You have to remind your children, constantly and tirelessly, that you love them. And you have to do so especially at those moments when they are determined to test your love. They need to know you love them even if they don’t want to hear it, and even especially when they don’t want to hear it. They may scoff and try to reject you. They’ll tell you that you’re embarrassing them. They’ll tell you to leave them alone. But you must never stop showing them how much you love them; to do otherwise is to capitulate to their evolving cynicism.
I tell my kids, “I know sometimes you are embarrassed by the way I show my love for you. Well, tough. Too bad. You’ll just have to live with it. I am never going to mask my affection for you. Ever. You are my children, and I will never be ashamed that I love you. I will not hold back, so you have no choice but to get used to it.”
Kids might want to show you that they don’t need the mushy stuff, but don’t let them fool you: We all need it.
From time to time, one of my children might appear troubled or remote, and I don’t let it slide, no matter how busy I am. “What is it?” I ask. “Why do you look so upset? Tell me what’s bothering you.” Sometimes I’ll take the opposite tack: I might approach one of my children when he or she is in an unusually good mood. “Do you know that a moment like this—seeing you smile, seeing you happy—is more precious to me than anything in the world. These are the moments I live for, these are the moments that bring me infinite joy.”
Often, when we’re gathered together, I’ll just tell my kids what’s in my heart—and I don’t need a reason to do it: “You kids sustain me. Do you know that? When I’m away from you, I can’t ever be happy. But when I come home and see your faces, I’m comforted and happy.”
They might smirk or giggle, and they might think I’m being a silly sentimentalist, but I say it anyway, because I know from experience that I’m getting through to them—that these words stay in their hearts.
While you can spoil your child, you can never love your child too much. The love you share with your child remains stored in his heart. And it will help him through the dark patches ahead.
Children are not likely to remember all the things you gave them, but they will always remember the love you poured into their lives.