What You Won't Do For Love

             

   The telephone chimed.  I scurried to reach my bedroom before it stopped ringing.  On the other end of the line was the familiar lyrical voice of my daughter.  Though she is nearly twenty-seven years of age, she sounds more like a character from Pixar’s Toy Story than a grown woman.

 “Mommy, did you know that the man that sings What You Won’t Do for Love is white?”  I could barely stifle the roar of laughter welling up from my belly! “Yes dear, Bobby Caldwell is white.” Her excited tone lingered through the rest of the conversation.  “He has so much soul.”  She giggled.  I deliberated, “Hmmm, a lot of soul. “  Too bad some people are devoid of soul.  My meaning of the word was a bit dissimilar to the denotation that labels Rhythm and Blues artists.

I speak specifically to women.  However, I apply this question to the male counterparts as well.  How many people have encountered someone that did not present themselves to have a conscience?  I took a break from spreading the sheet on my pillow top mattress, sat down, and further ruminated on the words that Bobby Caldwell crooned thirty-five years ago, “In my world, only you make me do for love what I would not do.”  How many darned times have I done things for love that I ordinarily would not have done? Geez!

I ask, how many dinners were purchased and/or prepared?  How many times was laundry done, houses cleaned and other people’s kids transported?  The outcome resulted in being dissed and dismissed by the person you loved, with the words, “I am over it! Too bad you aren't” 

I speak not only of so-called romantic relationships, I speak of relationships with people who have grinned in your face, ate in your kitchen and listened to your secrets.  What exactly would most of us do for love, what we would not do if we truly loved ourselves?  Are we truly socialized to love ourselves without being selfish and hedonistic? Or are we so codependent and needy that we become blind to who some people really are? Remember the group Guy? It's just a fantasy.  Image in a magazine!

What does a person do for love when they don’t know how to create boundaries that could potentially strangle the life out of them? I am curious to know, just how many of us have allowed ourselves to be so enamored by another individual that we lost focus our own being?  The interesting twist in that story is that the person that we enveloped our lives with ended up disappointing and injuring our souls to the core.

                What does one do for love that they ordinarily would not do?   I invite the enlightenment.