On Maternal and Paternal Love

This is it, we entered 2026 for good. Yes, I know, it’s already February. Every new year, I feel I need some time for the new number to become familiar. My banal and detailed sense of now has to merge with whatever the concept of 2026-as-a-future-year accumulated over time.

A fresh year is the prime time to set intentions. Instead of merging “now” with an old concept of the future, you craft a future self in hope it will change the “now.” In other words, we create expectations for our future selves.

It often goes like unused gym memberships bought on the second of January. In doing so, one loses more than their money; they lose their self-confidence. Plans start to fade until they sound like sheer words floating in the air, untethered to their actions. Or you start holding your expectations so strongly that you fail to update when you observe evidence that you’re not following your plans. This could go as far as rewriting your memories so you convince yourself you fulfilled your expectations, or that you didn’t because the expectation was not real after all.

We often consciously keep track of others’ reputations, yet the most important reputation to track might be our own. You could rewrite your memories all you want, change what was the real thing you were aiming at, but the tension accumulates. The body keeps the score. The mismatches between what you said to yourself and what you did accumulate over years, decades into growing pain in the hearts of many, a wound that says “you are not enough.”

The cruel part is that it feels like there is no way to reset the counter. The tensions are bound to accumulate for life. Throwing away the counter would mean removing the remaining, half-broken goal-setting mechanisms you keep using to get things done on a day-to-day basis. It would feel like printing money. Sure, you can do it, but this removes the meaning of the very thing you want to keep alive.

I am trying to cultivate a new frame to get out of this loop. My aspiration is to nurture and integrate maternal and paternal love. I want to hold at the same time a radical belief that I am enough, and a ruthless judgment for how my actions departed from my values and self-expectations.

Maternal love.

The first side is about looking at one’s life from a point of view of maternal love. It says that at every second, you are trying your best.

Maternal love looks at you, like you look at your immune system. You don’t pilot it, but you can make its work easier by resting, having healthy food, and finding warmth. You know that your immune system is working for your own good. It is very smart in some ways, but stupid in others. It can memorize the subtle chemical signature of an infection from 10 years ago, but triggers a full-out inflammation to innocuous pollen in your pharrynx.

There is no point in hating your immune system. It is a complex molecular machine that is at the same time vulnerable and wonderfully competent. More than that, *it is a piece of you * doing its best to help with the means it has.

For maternal love, you are enough like your immune system is enough. All the mistakes you’ve made in the past dissolve in her eyes. Even the times you did something after promising “never again!” Even if you’ve been failing in the same way over and over for ten years. Even if you hurt other people in the process. In her eyes, if this is what happened, then you didn’t know better, like your immune system didn’t know better when triggering an allergy.

It is hard to cultivate this radical self-love. Maybe it’s because it feels scary. If you accept to redeem yourself from all the mistakes you’ve made, you fear you’ll maybe never learn. You’ll keep making mistakes because mistakes don’t feel bad anymore.

It is true that mistakes will not lead to misery anymore, but counterintuitively, this will boost learning instead of reducing it. Maternal love gives the emotional safety to explore, because trial and error requires you to make, well, errors.

Paternal love.

Once maternal love is secured, you are safe to open up a new layer of clarity by cultivating paternal love. He looks at the past and notices the slightest deviation between your actions and your values. He sees the times you know in your heart that you slipped away from the standards you held for yourself.

He recalls the time you fell prey to the bystander effect. When you look at an unfair situation unfolding before your eyes without acting. He remembers the promise you made to yourself to “never again” do this thing that definitely hurts you. He knows the hard discussions you avoided, the difficult topics you looked away by fear you’ll see truths too hard to confront.

Thanks to maternal love, these missed opportunities don’t accumulate into tension anymore. You can reason about these without judging. You can reflect on questions like “was this too high of a standard to hold?” without being drawn to craft comforting beliefs. Paternal love sees sharply through you and holds yourself to your highest standards, exposing uncompromising truths. It also recognizes the potential within yourself, and challenges you to take on new challenges.

Departing thoughts.

These are very rough, preliminary formulations of archetypes I’m musing on. I feel there is something right about developing the ability to hold extremes of acceptance and ruthlessness at the same time, but I would not recommend literally holding the formulation I present here.

The order also matters. Deepening the two extremes at the same time might feel like adding weight on the two sides of an equilibrist’s perch. They need to be precisely of the same strength not to fall on the side of passivity, or uncheck inner criticism.

These two archetypes are still in progress, but they draw a path towards more healthy relation to self-expectations.