Prologue

Love is fire. But whether it's gonna warm your heart or burn your house down you can never tell.
~ Jason Jordon


Few people can pinpoint the exact moment when their life changed forever. That exact instant when you realize nothing would ever be the same again, you would never be the same again.

I can.
July 30th 2001 at 5:26pm.

That's when I got the phone call that would take everything I'd known, everything I'd thought and everything I'd ever imagined and turn it upside down. Reality would freeze and the sound of my own breath would become magnified. I would learn everything and nothing about the world, about fairness, about truth, all in one instant.

People are not who we think they are.
Everybody lies.
The world is not fair, and is not just, the world just...is.
The body can defy reason and change medical fact.
The heart is capable of actually breaking, splitting in two...and healing again.
We can love far beyond what we ever imagine possible.
We are all capable of taking and saving a life.
We are not all created equal.
We do not get to chose who we love.

This last fact would be tested time and time again, but always, like a stone wall, would prove to stand tall and true and against all reason and show that some of us...few of us...are actually capable of unconditional love.
Unconditional love is defined by our good-ole boy Weber as, "a term that means to love someone regardless of his actions or beliefs."
But, what does that actually mean?

I've learned that means they can hit you, throw you out, swear at you, spit at you, tell you to go to hell, tell you that you mean nothing to them, tell you they hate you, stress your marriage, steal your freedom, break your heart, lie to you...and still you will love them, care for them, sacrifice for them and be there for them.
Most people identify this kind of love as the one a parent has for their child. A love for your child is one that can not be explained, defined or even expressed in words- it is far too great, far too powerful. Love for one's child is the kind of love where you know, without second thought, that you would do anything to protect them, to keep them from hurting, to be sure they are happy.

But what about when the laws of the generations, the rules of parent and child are turned around? Can you honestly say that your child would do the same for you? After all a child is only intellectually capable of experiencing unconditional love once they've reached age 7, when they reach the concrete operations stage of development. For some this development comes even later at age 11 when they move into the formal operational stage of development- the stage where we all learn we are not the only ones that matter, our actions carry consequences and those consequences affect others.

Well, if Piaget is correct that would mean my father is about 10 years old, just shy of the formal operational stage...and if the definition of unconditional love is correct, and if this definition can be demonstrated most profoundly in the love one has for their child, then I have been a mother since I was eighteen years old.