I remember when I found out I was pregnant, finally, with Little Brother. I was talking to a friend who had just had her second about how love works in these scenarios; how the love she’d felt for her first had overwhelmed her, how she’d worried she wouldn’t have as much to give the second time around. How unfounded those worries had been, because this is not how love works–in some zero sum game, some exercise in division–but how it grows, multiplies, to meet demands.

I found the same to be true, of course. The impossibility of loving two kids equally, in defiance of maths and logic, is somehow true. There is always enough love to go around.

Kids know this, but somehow it’s trained out of us as we grow. This morning I read with LB’s class and all the kids came down hard on one who had, they thought, read more than her share. We headed back to the classroom but she remained in her spot, where I saw her choking on sobs at being misunderstood. Before I even got to her, a group of her classmates raced to her, turning on a dime from attack to empathy mode. Kids don’t falter, weighing the cost of vulnerability; they just love.

When I was dating, every time it didn’t work out (which was every time, but one), I panicked at what was slipping away, fearful it wouldn’t return. And it didn’t, but was replaced by what was better. I feared, I know now, that there would not be enough love remaining in the world when it was my turn to receive it. Now I know the lie that fear creates: that there is not enough for me and everyone else. I know how quickly I can move into strategy mode to protect myself from loss. How this only begets more loss: loss of empathy, loss of true connection.

I wonder, if I had known when I was younger that I was headed, always, for love–that there were days ahead when I’d marvel at the sense of safety and belonging embedded in that love–if I would have managed my life less and lived it more.

If I would remember that we’ll all get through traffic to our destination, that one person getting a book deal doesn’t take away my chance, would leave some room to breathe and just be. (With less flipped birds and road rage and “you dick” muttered not-so-much-under-my-breath.)

This fear of not enough–this scarcity mindset–I find it pockmarking my entire history, and I’m kind of over it? Generosity extended toward others reveals in ourselves whether we really think there is enough in the world–whether we live from a place of scarcity or abundance, and I find so often that I can resemble the worst of it, echoing those I’ve known through the years who believed in a story of a few fish and loaves feeding five thousand but not enough money to support tax breaks and relief packages for those in need. It all seems…contradictory.

In his poem “Desert Places,” Robert Frost wrote:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

between stars–on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The only emptiness, the only scarcity, is shown in what I allow to be missing from me. Because what I know to be true–what has been shown, finally, to me–is how much more there is than I can see. That, occasionally, my eyes open just wide enough to see glimpses of it, this more, and it is a lot closer to too much than not enough.