What is Real?

I've been scouring the internet looking for just the right words for our wedding.  Since it will be a secular wedding we've got a lot of choices; Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Socrates, Walt Whitman.  Not to mention all the songs and movies to choose from.  Then I stumbled across something that struck me.

My entire life my mother has read to me.  There was never a "no" when it came to books.  No matter what it was it was never denied, even if I had to sit on the floor with a dictionary in the other hand, she let me read it.  (I learned what mitochondria were while sitting on the dining room floor with The Wind in the Door in one hand and my dad's medical dictionary in the other.)  She also collected books for me.  Countless books.  So many books in fact that when My Love (whose parents were the exact same way) and I moved in together my step dad built us a library to house the insurmountable collection of books we had together. 

My mother's passion however was for children's books.  There is a certain simplistic magic about the logic in a children's book that captivates her.  While scholarly works are good for the mind, children's books are good for the heart.  She loves them all, so when I came across this suggested wedding reading I was surprised it hadn't come to me sooner. 

My mother had read this book to me countless times as a child.  Looking back it was a book that had frightened me as a child for two reasons.  First of all because the boy in the story had pneumonia.  I was hospitalized with pneumonia the year both Jim Henson and my neighbor's son died from it.  I sobbed at my grandmother that if the doctors couldn't save Jim Henson how could they save me?  Secondly because the thought of loving another person that much terrified me.  To love another person so much that it destroyed me shook my little five year old soul to the core.  I told my mother that I would never love anyone that much, and in all her wisdom she didn't say a word.  She just gave me that all knowing mother look.


So fast forward 23 years later. Here I am, my adult self scouring the internet for words to describe the love I have for another human being and I stumble across this passage.  I immediately started crying because it had taken me 23 years to realize what my mom had known all along.  I was completely capable of loving someone, and being loved by someone, that much.

So I think it's only fitting to ask her to read this at our wedding.

"What is Real?"

From "The Velveteen Rabbit" by Margery Williams

 

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."