Valentines, Love and Learning
Maybe about 40 years ago I received a valentine I’ve never forgotten: My Pappa brought home a red rose for my mother and a white one for me… and a fancy heart-shaped box full of chocolate almond bark. I vividly remember sitting on the bench in our VW van deciding which of the white or dark chocolate to bite first. It was AMAZING to me — all of it was a totally new phenomenon. I felt my Pappa’s love just perfectly, and knew that one day I’d have a partner who would give me a red rose, like the one he gave my mother. I also remember my mother’s face as she looked down at me with her rose in her hand, and me with mine. She smiled with those tearful eyes that said she was so happy that my Pappa loved me.
Valentines was torture at school. Most years in elementary school we had to make and decorate large envelopes to receive the dozens of little drugstore cards from our classmates. I was one of those kids whose envelope was usually empty, with exception of the year my teacher gave me a card, and the year my friend gave me a card, but then announced to the class that she only gave it to me because her mother forced her to give one to everybody. It was easier when the envelope was empty.
But there was still home. I still have a Valentine my younger brother gave me at the time. It says “It’s Valentins so yippy.” Every year my mother gave me a card of some type to remind me that her love was forever, and a lovely dinner cooked for us and our Pappa. Every year my birth father gave me a gigantic heart-shaped card to remind me that his love was gigantic… until, in his later years, he began giving me and my sisters heart ornaments bought from his friend’s shop. He died just before Valentines, six years ago, and it turned out he had already ordered hearts for us. His friend gave them to us just after he died, because his love is forever, too. My step-mother used to make us heart-shaped pancakes. Through any trauma that befell me, I did know I was loved.
By the time I was a teenager, I was a staunch feminist, but still holding out for the man who would rescue me… and bring me a red rose! The irony never occurred to me. After a slew of boyfriends and what I considered to be failed Valentines (where my gifts were unwanted, or the current boyfriend had no interest in romance or celebrating Valentines Day, or — even worse — he did, but I was just the object in the equation), I was still waiting to be rescued. I became bitter about the whole enterprise, and arranged to trade roses with my roommate in the Netherlands, as a single-ladies’ revolt against our own expectations. I bought her a gorgeous dark red rose, and she bought me a chocolate rose. We were both deeply disappointed.
There was a guy who worked at the Shoarma downstairs from us, and he kept trying to romance me with fancy bouquets sent to my door and a cacophony of lude and upsetting commentary every time I parked my bike outside the shop on my return home. I feared his advances, and made sure never to park my bike alone in the evening, as long as the Shoarma was open.
Then I fell in love. I mean really, deeply in love for only the second time in my life. Except this time I was wary with my heart. I had a hard time trusting the love, and besides, I lived in the Netherlands and Markus lived in Canada. I sent him a basket of picnic supplies for our first Valentines, to be celebrated later when I would return to Canada, and watched the mail hopefully, but nothing arrived for me. On Valentines I went to school late just so I could wait for the mail. It finally came, and there was no Valentine for me. I was terribly unproductive that day at school, and reminding myself that I really needed to stop waiting to be rescued. I resented the very thing I was waiting for, and all the many ways Valentines had made me feel unvalued over the years. I resented men. Maybe even love.
Eventually I came home from school to find a giant bouquet of dark red roses leaning against my door. Stupid Shoarma guy! I was so mad, so hurt; so jilted that I stormed up and down the hallway, hoping the guy from the Shoarma would hear me from downstairs, swearing at him for sending me yet another wasteful, unwanted bouquet. I was angry because it was so beautiful, and Markus had sent me nothing. I was angry because I’d waited all morning for that nothing and now there was a gorgeous bouquet from somebody I was terrified of. My roommates laughed at me. They told me to read the card.
No way I’m reading the card! Stupid idiot! Why can’t he take no for an answer!?
They started looking more annoyed than mischievous and told me I was being the idiot. Again, they told me to read the card. So I did. It was written in a woman’s handwriting, and said:
“Emily: No rose can ever compare to you. No rose can ever fully express my love to you. Markus.”
It turned out he tried to send me 12 red roses, and the fax to the Dutch flower shop somehow turned 12 into 22, so that’s what I got. I didn’t even know international mail-order flowers was a thing! I think I crumbled in a confusion of joy, shame and frustration.
So, that day was twenty-five years ago today. Last night, as I was busy making treats for Markus and the children, he came in with eight beautiful wooden hearts he’d been making in his tool shed, and hung them from the dining room light-fixture. This morning my best friend — the one who has been in my life since preschool — told me happy Valentines, and my kids are making sandwiches and scones for our Valentines high tea. They came to my bed and snuggled me good morning.
We live in the house Markus built for us out of my childhood home — the same one I lived in when my Pappa gave me the white rose and heart-shaped box of chocolate. We live here with our two teenaged children, a dog, two cats, twenty chickens, and thousands of veggie plants. We live next door to my parents and across the island from my brother and his partner. It took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that I’d been rescued, just after I finally gave up hoping for it, but I have been. It wasn’t a knight in shining armour, it is my parents, my siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, husband, children and friends, including those who have left me, now, and those I hardly know who gave or accepted love somewhere along the way. It’s all the ways people stay a constant to me in the times when I feel abandoned. It is those who see me when I’m not looking to be seen, and who let me see them, even when they want to be invisible. It’s those who show up courageously, like my brother at my door with a bouquet of flowers not for Valentines but because the Moosehide Campaign made him think of me. It’s the long ribbon of love, carried and dropped and picked up again in mid-air by all the people of my life. Thank you all. Happy Valentines Day. Love, Emily
