Candlelit dinner, soft jazzy music playing ....
I lean over my dinner..
....and laugh with my daughter who is sitting across the table from me.
Valentine's day has never been one of my favorite holidays. I have had two memorable ones. One was in high school when my friend, a local radio celebrity, heard me say that I had never had a boyfriend on Valentine's day. He showed up after my play rehearsal on the night of Valentine's day with a box of chocolates, flowers and a Valentine card that wouldn't fit through his car window.
The other was when I received a basket of live flowering plants and a card that tugged so much at my heart strings that I can't part with it even if this man never speaks to me again, as it contains a prayer beseeching God to show me that I am worthy of being loved - a sentiment which I believed for a while.
Up ahead on the beltway I could see that the traffic was bumper to bumper. The exit was clear and the service road traffic moving so I made my choice, and exited right.
Two miles later I was bumper to bumper with other cars on the service road moving more slowly than the beltway, and there I was fuming with my choice. About twenty minutes later, a firetruck approached me from the rear. I moved over, allowing it to pass by, but as I tried to regain my place in the traffic line,the driver of the sedan behind the truck not only lurched forward preventing my entry, but laughed at me and gestured antagonistically with his arms.
Already feeling emotionally weak, I let his actions get under my skin and rattle me. However, I didn't let loose with the sobbing tears until I saw what the driver did at the next traffic light. This man, the same man who was not only rude to me a tenth of a mile before but looked me in the eye and mocked and laughed at me, put down his window and handed money to a man standing on the corner holding a sign asking for help. I wasn't crying because a stranger was rude to me. I cried because of the memories this stranger awoke in my head.
I spent twenty-five years with a man who could call me vulgar names until I was crying on the floor and then take his coat off and give it to a homeless man the same afternoon. Seeing how generous he was to others made me think that I was the problem. I knew he had goodness in him and wanted to be kind, so when he was unkind to me, I thought it must be my fault. I believed it had to be because of something I said or did that caused him to behave the way he did. Of course it wasn't my fault that my former spouse could not control his rage or his abusive tongue. I know that thinking I deserved it is neither constructive nor even true. But I don't yet have a new truth to replace the voice telling me I am at fault when things go wrong. I am like a child who has learned a language badly, with mispronunciation and bad grammar. I know what I'm saying is the wrong way to say it, but I have no one with whom I can practice the correct way and so I'm stuck speaking it wrong. No amount of telling me that the words I'm saying are mispronounced will help me; until I learn the language the way it is supposed to be spoken and have someone with whom I can practice, I feel like a bumbling fool, wondering what I said wrong, or what I did wrong that caused a relationship to end, or made a person walk away and how I can fix it.
I keep that Valentine card in a drawer. Although looking at it from time to time and thinking about a time of being loved makes me smile, the words of hope that were once so meaningful to me are now simply printed letters, no different than rules of grammar of a language I am still trying to learn. I think about my beautiful Valentine date, my daughter, and at times I just want to keep silent, and not speak at all because she is still learning this language, and I'm afraid she will pick up my mispronounced words and my bad grammar. I know it's my job to teach her the true beautiful language that is our mother tongue, but years of bad practice has left me mute at times and a cruel teacher at others. She recognizes the bad grammar, as I do. She also knows how it's supposed to sound, how it can beautifully flow from the tongue. I only hope that she hasn't heard so much of the damaged language that she won't be able to speak it when she finds her own Valentine, and that her card will be much more to her than a book of grammar to be tucked away in a drawer.
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