Sometimes Love Surprises You… and other thoughts on Valentine’s Day
February 14, 2011 in Guatemala, North America, Travelogue
Hannah's feelin' the Love.
Sometimes love surprises you.
I had the great privilege of growing up in one of the best families on the planet. If you’ve ever met my parents you know that I’m not exaggerating in the least.
There really couldn’t have been any better introduction to the world and what it means to love. No one is perfect, they weren’t, but they did their level best with what they had at every point and if I do half as well with my tribe I’ll consider it a wild success.
Their secret ingredient? I’ve thought about it a lot, I really think it was the love, pure and simple.
It’s hard not to think about love on Valentine’s Day, even though I’m not a huge fan of the commercialized celebration.
To me, Valentine’s Day too often embodies everything that love is not:
- Superficial
- Store-bought
- Overly sentimental
- Contrived
- Sticky sweet.
I’d rather pass on almost all of that. However, I love the idea of setting aside the day to love even harder than usual and say the things that we really mean but often gloss over in everyday life.
I don’t want flowers, or cards, or candy (unless it’s a Milka bar!) and I don’t want to be taken out to dinner any more than on any other day. What I want, is simply to love and be loved, and for Valentine’s Day to be a bigger, huggier version of every other day in my life.
I may be the luckiest person alive. I know this. I’ve been loved and loved deeply by many (of you) from the day I took my first breath. I’ve been blessed beyond measure in love and suffered very little, in the grand scheme of things. The older I get the more I appreciate that.
I had parents who modeled love in the healthiest, most devoted and beautiful of it’s forms, even on the hard days… months, years…. I was lucky enough to meet my husband young and marry a man who elevates love to an art form and escape relatively unscathed in between.
The longer I breathe, the more I discover that I don’t know much.
Love seems, to me, to be one of these great “unknowables” in life.
- How does it happen?
- Why does it happen?
- Can we choose it?
- What in the world IS it, anyway?
- Is it just a chemical reaction, as my friend and I were discussing by the lago the other day?
I think it must be more than biology… but I’m not sure of that.
What I do know is that it’s not in the least predictable it creeps in like a slow fog and, alternately, takes my breath away like the freefall on a roller coaster.
- The bottomless love of my babies being placed in my arms… who knew?
- The bomb shell of opening my eyes one spring morning to find Tony’s eyes six inches from mine and the realization that he wasn’t just my best friend any more. I’d fallen asleep watching a movie, he didn’t sleep at all, all night… he just watched me.
- The earthquake that is finding out love doesn’t fade over twenty years, it just quietly grows.
- The rushing current of sharing life with friends, all of us pouring through the years together, tumbling over rocks and deep falls only to come up for air holding hands and moving forward.
- The warm sunny day that is the privilege of lavishing love on someone you don’t love at all, just because you have it, they lack it, and sometimes love is the very best medicine.
Valentine’s Day arrived quietly on the lago this morning.
I heard my tiny elves sneaking around the kitchen making tea, setting up their cards and treasures for one another.
I awoke to tangible love in the form of wobbly cut-outs, sticky with white glue from tiny hearts whose love humbles me and love notes from far away too. One carefully written note that made me realize, once again, that my girl won’t be celebrating too many more Valentine’s Days with us.
There will be no romantic celebration of this day this year; Daddy is away working (the ultimate expression of love?)
Instead we’ve cut and pasted a hundred hearts in red and pink and white. Hannah and I have tied red curly ribbons into our hair and we’re making heart shaped pizzas and brownies for dinner tonight.
Short are the days when a celebration of Love inspires a frenzy of sibling fun and I intend to milk it for all it’s worth and share it in every way we can.
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So, how did your parents do it? How does a parent choose or know to be the kind of loving parent that raises kids like you, kids who grow up to raise kids like yours? Chance? Choice? How they were raised?
Honestly… I don’t think there’s one answer for that. My parents did their level best to raise us to love people, not things, to be self-sufficient, capable, hard working, glass half full, dreamers of big dreams and “sky’s the limit” sort of people. They kept us out of debt, focused on education (but not as a means to employment, rather self improvement) and emphasized the importance of living and working together instead of leading independent lives under one roof. They didn’t shelter us, but they did protect us. They brought as many people from different lifestyles, nationalities, belief systems, and backgrounds as possible through our house and included us in the dinner conversation. The read to us, a lot… all sorts of stuff, from Watership Down, to Josephus, to Mark Twain. They made sure we had a working knowledge of several languages. Instead of doing stuff FOR us they did stuff WITH us. We were ALWAYS loved, my Dad was famous for saying, “I love YOU, but that behavior is socially unacceptable.” We knew that no matter our life choices we, as people, were treasured. Plus, they just stuck it out. There HAD to be times that were harder than others in so many ways that little kids just don’t understand, but we were sheltered from that and allowed to just root down and grow in the happy knowledge that our little family unit was indestructible. That matters a lot, I think.
Surely there is some chance involved. It’s always an experiment raising kids. But I think there’s a great deal of choice too. Thinking it through, making the best choice for today with an eye toward the long term. My point in this post was just the importance of love in all of that… and that really, at the end of the day, no matter what else is going down, whether we’re committed to Love with a capital L above all things is really the determining factor in a family that over the 50 year long haul is AMAZINGLY beautiful and successful, or one that falls apart by year ten when the rubber first really meets the road in a serious way. I don’t know that for sure, it’s just my observation based on my own experience 18 years into this thing and with the life experience handed to me by my parents.
How were they raised? Absolutely average baby-boomers. They met at Southport HS in Greenwood, Indiana when my Mom was 13 and my Dad was 16. Lived in the sub-urbs. Went to sock hops. Somewhere along the way, they just decided to do it differently when their turn came. For which, I’m eternally grateful.
I’m saving what you wrote, printing it off, to remind me and Darin what to keep foremost, when everything else seems too complex and difficult to navigate. I, too, think love is really the answer. My parents did a lot of things raising us that I don’t want to do as a parent — but in the forefront, then and now, was love. I never ever doubted how completely, unconditionally, and passionately they loved us (and love us now). Both my parents told us every day, and I never felt it was trite. So much more to say…but I wanted to thank you for this post. It’s one of the best Valentine’s Day things I’ve ever read.
The boys had a good time me thinks?
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I became slightly reconciled to Valentine’s Day when I realized that red wine and roses happen to be two of the world’s great Christian symbols. Red wine, signifying the blood of loving sacrifice, the communion of saints in love for one another in the light of the One True Love, and also the harvested goodness of cultivated soil, which required stability and hard work and a home. Roses, going at least as far back as Dante’s Paradiso, signifying the shape of heaven, and the mirroring light of the saints in worship. Together, the wine and the rose tell an old story of true love: sacrifice, return from the dead, and the promise of paradise.