Read Online Whatever...Love Is Love by Maria Bello - Free Book Online

to look into the eyes of the other caterpillars. “Kill or be killed” is his driving thought. And he stomps on their heads if he has to. He becomes callous and cool and keeps climbing until he is near the top. “Yes,” he thinks, “I’ll show Yellow, and all of those below me, that I got to the top and beat those beneath me who were too insecure or not strong enough to make it.” So he keeps climbing, at one point making it so close to the top that he can look around at all that surrounds him. He sees there are hundreds of caterpillar piles just like the one he is climbing. When Stripe finally makes it to the top, he sees the most beautiful creature flying above the pile. Yellow and kind, she looks in his eyes and he knows. It’s Yellow, the hairy caterpillar he left behind.
    â€œOh no, I’ve been climbing all this time, killing people, throwing them off of the pile to see this ? You’ve got to be kidding me,” he thinks. “All this way and all this work and it was just to see my girlfriend flying, looking all pretty while I’m still a hairy caterpillar?”
    So in disgrace, even though he could have held on to her skinny legs and been brought down the caterpillar pile, Stripe starts down alone. Now he doesn’t push others aside. He looks them in the eyes and sees the humanity in each one of them. “You are a reflection of me and I am a reflection of you. I am your brother and you are mine.” He feels like an asshole remembering who he was when he was climbing. But he accepts the embarrassment and the pain he has caused others. He owns the desperation that he had felt to get what he thought would make him complete.
    In the end, Stripe gets down from the pile and, soundlessly, Yellow gestures for him to build a cocoon. And he does.
    Since first hearing this story in second grade, I have remembered Stripe and Yellow’s journey. I wondered, even at that young age, if there was something more to life than what I saw in magazines or on television. If there was more to being happy than living in a beautiful home, having fancy cars, and wearing expensive clothes. I could be a butterfly, I thought. I don’t want to be a caterpillar.
    But I knew that the lesson of Yellow and Stripe was one I wanted to teach my boy. I wanted to show him that he has his own voice and should follow his own path, not to hop on the train with assholes just because they say something is great. I want him to know that all of life is about transitions. It’s about learning and becoming the best you are meant to be. But it takes a transition to do so.
    When I gave birth to Jack, I really understood the word transition . In pregnancy terms it is the time between when you are screaming in agony, having contractions at seven centimeters dilated, but not allowed to push. They say it is the most painful part of labor, but also the shortest, anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and a half. I knew mine would be very short. I had walked every day and spoke to Jack in my tummy and visualized an easy birth. “Transition is a good thing,” my midwife said. “It means baby will be coming soon.” And I believed her.
    I gave birth in our home on top of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. I wanted the kind of “natural” birth my friends and I were so into at the time. We believed, because of our spiritual practices and study of Kundalini yoga, that the best way to give birth was with no drugs, no harsh lights, no hospitals, and no doctors with scalpels who just wanted to cut you open to get the baby out so that they could get home for dinner. We decided that it was best for baby to come out fully undrugged and aware. We wanted to be fully present and not knocked into a state of unconsciousness when our precious ones were born. And so it would be for me. It was a bunch of crap, but I bought into the idea. It is the right thing for some women but for me, not so much.
    Dan and I