I Heart You Not

 Holidays, Love, Relationships  2 Responses »
Feb 122012
 

I despise holidays based on either extortion or expectations of the heart.

Everyone knows my feelings about Halloween. (See “Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement.”) Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with it; I was tempted to name this post “Why I Spend Valentine’s Day Under the Bed.” 

I didn’t always think Valentine’s was a total waste of pink, doilies, and red construction paper. I’m not a complete ogre. I still have those homemade love notes from my kids, and they still make me cry. And then I remember those same kids, years later, sobbing in my arms because some elementary school doofus gave everyone a Valentine but her or because she did’t receive a rose that day from a single high school moron.

This holiday is rife with expectation, hope, and sentimentality. It makes me gag. It makes my heart hurt for all those sitting at home waiting and for those coerced into going out on a miserable date not because you want to but because that’s what you’re supposed to do on February 14.

Romantic love is not dashing into Cub Foods at 5 p.m. and snagging the last bouquet or giving, heaven forbid, a love coupon worth one heck of a time at a future date. It is not having a jet waiting to fly you to Paris (althought that could earn massive points).

Romantic love is giving and receiving a smile EVERY day. It is keeping your mouth shut when you are jumping-around-inside-of-you dying to say something.

You want true love? I’ll give it to you.

One day my husband (whom I shall call Rubbertoes) and I were arguing in the backyard. I forget what it was about, but it started to get heated. Finally, my normally peaceful Rubbertoes flung his gardening trowel into a bed of impatiens and shouted: “And that’s your heart!” For a moment, the world stopped; the birds ceased singing; the children gasped.

And then I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my lawn chair.

No one sends a spade spinning into the aorta of a garden unless they truly care. When we drive each other to the edge and still hang on, that is love. It does’t have anything to do with chocolates or jewelry or tattoos.

My curmudgeonly advice: Don’t do anything special this holiday. Instead, make all the other days of the year special. That’s my plan—do nothing. At least until the grandkids come along.

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Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? How? Are you a curmudgeon or a mushy, chocolate-loving, diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend sort?

Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement

 Holidays, Married Life, Relationships  12 Responses »
Oct 282011
 

Our marriage is a Halloween-free zone.We also avoid restaurants with themes, ever since the waiter at Renaissance Buffet plopped down on one knee, thumped his chest, and said, “My liege, might I suggest a hearty meat pie or a joint of our finest mutton roast?”

That put my husband off his feed. “I don’t like people in costumes touching my food,” he said. “They unnerve me.”

“Hmm?” I said, studying the menu. “What’s in the Borgia Burger?”

You might wonder how we raised two daughters with these types of phobias. We did okay until they hit preschool and learned from some loudmouth that other kids actually procured bags of goodies on Halloween. That happened to be the Halloween they both had chicken pox, so after much begging, I relented to conjuring up two princess costumes. I smeared white makeup on their faces to hide the red spots and pronounced them ghost princesses. I agreed to let them extort candy from one house.

When we returned, my oldest said with dreamy eyes, “That was so much fun. Next year, can we do two houses?”

And that was the end of my Halloween bliss until they got old enough to make their own costumes and preferred parties to walking the streets.

Really, I don’t think we need to teach our kids about extortion. There is enough of that in the world already between South American kidnappers and Somali pirates. Maybe, instead, we should turn the day upside down and have our kids give out treats instead of asking for them.

Being a chocolate lover, I could get into that. But wait, I’m not allowed to answer the door on Halloween. Ever since our daughters went to college, our tradition has been a simple one: we hide.

We order Chinese takeout, pull the shades, turn out the lights, and go to the basement with our moo goo gai pan. There we watch a romantic comedy, where no one is terrorized by little beings in costumes or overzealous waiters.