How do you love a kid like Kevin?

While initially it may not seem as if there is much of a distinction between loving someone and wanting to love someone, I believe that the difference between the two is huge, and that it poses an important question throughout Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin—Does Eva love Kevin or does she merely want to love Kevin? My answer has waffled quite a bit up to this point in the reading, and I still am unable to say that I feel 100 percent one way or another. In fact, I won’t deny that I found passage upon passage in which Eva seemed to neither love Kevin nor want to love him. However, throughout this literary response I would like to explore the idea that Eva desperately, albeit unsuccessfully, wanted to love her son.

One of Eva’s more trying moments in motherhood came after she found out that she had wrongly accused Kevin of being the mastermind behind the prank he and his friend Lenny played, where they threw rocks off the side of a bridge into oncoming traffic. She felt guilty that she had not believed Kevin in the first place, and to make up for it she decided to have a “date” with Kevin in order to spend more time together. However, as their date drew closer, Eva found herself dreading it: “To say that I wanted, truly desired, to spend all afternoon and evening with my prickly fourteen-year-old son would be a stretch, but I did powerfully desire to desire it” (269). This is the best example of Eva’s “wanting to want” feelings regarding Kevin. While she does admit to hating Kevin “often” during one of their tense jailhouse visits (44), she never explicitly states, without any qualifiers, that she hates Kevin. However, she also never says that she wholly loves him. To the bitter end she keeps attempting to communicate with him, to understand him, and most importantly, to love him. But she is never able to accept Kevin for exactly who he is, and therefore she is never able to love him, as she admits that “Kevin was hard to like, much less to love” (224).

With a child like Kevin it is understandable that Eva had a difficult time enjoying his sour company, and I have to give Eva credit for her constant attempts to form a deeper bond with her firstborn. However, up to this point in the reading, she has ultimately failed to love Kevin.