Love doesn’t end with “I love you.”
Love always comes with an and.
I love you and I want you to be safe.
I love you and I want to guide you.
I love you and I fear for you.
And because I love you, I am struggling to accept your choices that feel unfamiliar, uncertain, and frightening to me.
These are conditions that come with love.
When I read Lea Salonga say parents must love their children “unconditionally, full stop,” and warns those who can’t to not have children at all, she speaks from a place of beautiful ideal and devastating simplicity. But this framing is a kindness that accidentally erases millions of loving hearts.
I know this erasure. Being someone who once thought maybe not having kids is safer — because what if one day they come out to me as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community… “hindi ko kaya!” — I initially agreed. But I was mistaking unconditional love as blind affirmation; and non-affirmation as death of love.
Because the “hindi ko kaya” does not mean the love stops — parental love is not something that switches on and off in an instant. For a parent, “hindi ko kaya” is not a full stop. It is a semicolon in a much longer sentence of care. It can mean:
“Hindi ko kaya” — I am struggling to reconcile the child I know with a future I never imagined.
“Hindi ko kaya” — I love you too deeply for this not to shatter my understanding of your world.
“Hindi ko kaya” — I can’t just smile and wave as you walk toward a horizon that, from where I stand, looks lined with storms.
“Hindi ko kaya” — I don’t know if my heart can carry this and still hold you the way you need.
For many parents, “I can’t” is not the end of love. It is love’s raw, gasping first breath in a new and terrifying atmosphere. It means “I don’t know yet how to carry this without breaking—but I am still here, holding on.”
Love does not evaporate upon impact. It transmutes—into fear, into grief, into fierce, clumsy protection. Its expression is shaped by concern, values, and the terrifying, human limit of a parent’s imagination.
Love doesn’t withdraw — but it also doesn’t go blind. To ask it to is to ask for a love that is not a feeling, but a doctrine.
This is the conditional clause at the heart of the unconditional: Love that feels no fear, questions no path, and absorbs no shock… isn’t love. It’s concession. It’s detachment wearing love’s mask.
So yes, love your child unconditionally. But understand that the truest form of that love may not always be a serene, pre-approved acceptance. It may be the ferocious, messy, and painful struggle to rebuild a world where you can recognize each other again. That struggle is not love stopping. It is love fighting for its life.