I write and reflect a lot about the less easily defined or understood emotions on my personal blog and I tend to think of them in terms of expansion. There reaches a point, I consider it self awareness, but feel free to call it whatever you want, to where things stop existing in black and white or easily defined metrics. I often wonder if there are ways to measure things like awareness, love, happiness, joy, or gratitude. I haven't conceived of a way to measure these things and there are plenty of people that I'm sure have spent their lives trying to do so and I won't waste mine following in their footsteps.
My perspective on these things is that they simply expand and we feel them more deeply. I don't think there is ever a way to really feel them less, but we can deny feeling them. Denial is the way to cope with feeling or knowing something that you don't want to accept is true. For example, I can love my parents even though I feel they probably weren't ever ready to be parents at any point in their lives. On that note, who can really say when anyone is ever really ready for something like that. Perhaps parenting is just steadily expanding your awareness and love for someone on a continual basis and doing the best you can for them. Then again that seems to be what love is in general in my mind. Namaste.