Lookin for Love in all the wrong Davids

Happy Valentine's Day!

Just to start I want to say that I don't love Valentine's.  As a high school teacher it is the most dreaded of holidays; teachers find it hard to work as they vicariously re-live their adolescent nightmares and all of the students for various reasons are totally distracted.  All the girls without a Valentine are on edge all day, while all the girls with a Valentine are at the least quietly smug, or at worst openly bragging about their swag.  Meanwhile all the boys with a Valentine are sweating it out in hopes that they did good enough and all the rest are laughing at their buddies while secretly wishing that someone would hold them and tell them everything will be alright.  Not to mention the almost constant disturbances to my classroom as various and sundry gifts make their way into my students' hands.

Also, I have this need, a drive, even, to buy gifts for my family simply because the media tells me to.  Even if I decide I will not buy my kids cheesy candy boxes and yet another small stuffed dog holding a rose, even if I vow not to get Dave something he will not like and have to pretend to like until he can return it, even when I swear again and again that I will control myself, I can't.  I walk down the aisles of our local hot-spot for high-class gifts, aka Wal-Mart, and when I reach the check-stand I realize that I somehow have a cart full of Valentine's paraphernalia, a veritable treasure trove of heart-shaped, cheaply made curios that I neither want nor need.  All it does is make David (who really does hate this day) angry, and makes me regretful.  And yet, come each February 12 or 13 I am back at the store with my cart full and my soul empty.

Don't even get me started on the treats I  love and hate, both to buy and to make. Oh, the endless hours of work that sound fun, but drag out and in the end just lead to fatter thighs!

But all of this pales in comparison to my actual, embarrassing reason for disliking Valentine's.  The real reason is that I never really get anything.  I give to all my family, I see my students receive, I hear of my Mom's flowers, my sisters chocolates and I simply sigh, being resigned to getting almost nothing or worse, something silly I know my good husband simply got to mollify my hurt or anger.  The fact is Dave does not like this holiday and feels morally opposed to buying something simply because the candy companies tell him to.  I understand that he has his standards and sticks to them, and to a certain extent I agree, but I am still am sad when I don't get something nice.  He always tells me I’m his Valentine, we usually go out or have a nice dinner at home with the kids basement banished, but no thoughtful gifts ever show up.

Now, I know this sounds whiny; it is!  I have a great husband who loves to give me unexpected gifts and unexpected times and I LOVE it!  Despite that I always feel a faint disappointment that has grown into a resigned grumpiness when it comes to Valentine's Day.  I have especially always wanted to get a lovely bouquet of flowers delivered to school for everyone to see—I am a product of the romantic comedy generation—but even when I give pretty big hints it still hasn't happened on Valentine's Day.  However, this excitement and resultant disappointment over Valentine’s gifts and flowers began many years ago.

When I was a little girl there was a Valentine bake sale and I asked a boy to be my boyfriend and then asked him to buy me a rice krispie square.  Once said square was consumed and recess over, I dumped him.  Sad, but true.  I think this one misdeed of my youth messed up my Valentine’s karma for many years to come.  My first boyfriend dumped me right before Valentine's and my next boyfriend dumped me right after Valentine's!  Needless to say, flowers or other gifts were not in my life very often.  As young woman I finally received my first rose for Valentine's by my kind cousin Angie, who is forever my hero because of that.  (I even still have it dried and saved in a box I made-just goes to show how silly I can be!)

Some special flowers: my rose from Angie is the red one, 2 from my wedding bouquet, 2 from the first flowers Dave bought me after we were married and one from the flowers I got from a theater performance.

I later got a beautiful rose by some of my guy friends in college, but that was about it.  My history is sad, but I can’t help but feel it was all my fault for so cruelly using a young third grader to get what I wanted.

This year, as per usual, I was steeling myself for the non-gifting, and telling myself that I was ok with that (why do I really care anyway?), but as you may have already guessed, I was surprised!  Yesterday I was finishing up watching Hamlet with my 3rd hour class and an office aide came in with a beautiful bouquet of flowers.  I was rolling my eyes thinking, "Oh great, the bacchanalia begins early!" when the aide brought it to my desk!  I was thrilled.  As I opened the card I was at first confused to find it blank.  Then, I turned it over and saw which card was chosen and I knew that Dave had done it!  He had fulfilled my petty, long-standing Valentine’s wish!  Later another plant was brought in and I found out that my sweet Dad had remembered me, too!  I was so thrilled,it was flower mania!  I was so pleased, and happy too, that David had not just made me happy, but had kept his same, quirky charm that made me fall for him in the first place.

You see, the card, the blank one that came with his lovely bouquet said “Congratulations, It’s a Boy!” 

I am not pregnant – well, I better not be!—and so this was by no means a subtle hint or inside joke. No, the man who once gave his mother a Dragon Ball Z birthday card that said “To a big 7 year old” and who once inscribed a very special gift with the note that he bought it with his drug money had struck again!  I’m not sure why I wanted him to give me these flowers so badly when the card ended up being my favorite part.  He truly is my greatest (and weirdest) gift!