Oh, Valentine’s Day, you are the king of greeting card holidays. A holiday, that when you are single, can be a painful reminder of your singleness. A holiday, for married people or people in relationships, can cause widespread panic over finding yourself in a last minute, way-too-long-line, buying heart-shaped boxes of poorly made chocolates, or wilty, over-priced, red roses.
For the married-with-children set, on Valentine’s Day, a day typically reserved for thinking about love and buying something to give to loved ones to express that love, we worry about the probability of finding a babysitter as we compete with other families for one. Then maybe a close second to that worry, is once we find a sitter, we pray she wears the kids out enough so that the kids are in bed sleeping when we return home so we can have a chance for some much needed one-on-one time.
As married people with children we have to schedule our adult playtime, we have to make sure that the door is locked so that no little people wander in and wonder out loud “Daddy what are you doing to Mommy?” Gone are the days when we could just fling off our clothes and roll around on the floor. We can’t count the number of times that we’ve talked about going upstairs to “roll around” but then opted-out out of pure laziness only instead to catch up on our favorite DVR’d episodes of other people’s sex lives. I know a married-with-kids couple that finally found the time to get together only to discover that their bottle of personal lubricant expired in 2005. Embarrassing! Have you ever considered getting a room at a local hotel so you could spend some “special” time together without the kids barging in, the baby crying, or the dog barking? The expense of a room doesn’t seem worth it if you can’t sleep there and have breakfast in bed too. We honestly thought about it but haven’t tried it. We usually do dinner and a movie but we haven’t ruled it out of our realm of possibility for the near future. I’ll keep you posted (much to my husband’s chagrin, I’m sure).
Oh, Valentine’s Day, you used to be so different. I remember my first Valentine’s Day with Brent. We drank red wine together at a romantic restaurant in Carmel called La Boehme. They had a delicious pre-set menu. He gave me a heard shaped necklace with a clock inside the heart. He wrote me poetry. I was given a red rose. La Boehme is now out of business and I haven’t been back to Carmel since that time (over 14 years ago). When we came home, we had time to ourselves and enjoyed each other’s company without little people wandering in to see what we were up to. Nights flowed into days and days flowed into nights and on into the day after that. We stopped to take breaks to 7-11 for thirst quenching Big Gulps.
Today, fortunately, we have the babysitter lined up so we can go out together (a few days earlier than the 14th). Heck, we even offered up our babysitter to friends for the actually Valentine’s Day since we weren’t going to need her (generous, I know…we will never see her again). We have a full day planned together followed by a nice meal at our favorite steak house in San Francisco. Valentine’s Days are different now. They require much work and planning and help from people we pay to help us. Then when we finally get away without the kids the funny thing is we miss them, we spend much of our time talking about them and the hysterical things they did or said that day. I have to remember this because when I am dying for a break most days, truth is, I really only need a short one before I’m ready to get back in the game with my kiddos.
My kids are my Valentine’s now. They are my walking greeting cards in this life. They make me laugh out loud in the isles, they make me happy, give me inspiration, and even sometimes sympathy, but they are my “x’s” and “o’s”. I don’t feel sorry for myself that my Valentine’s Days aren’t what they used to be. I have all of the cards that my husband has ever given me saved in various places around the house, I have them to hold onto and to look at them when needed to remember those days. I’ve heard it said that having children is an amazing experience because you learn what love truly is. You learn how to love more and to give more than you have ever given. Now that I have three, I can’t imagine loving anything more, except maybe my husband, who gave these three girls to me in the first place. He is my mack-daddy Valentine and I am one lucky woman.
Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone! As spoken by the poet Lenny Kravitz, “We got to let love rule!”