The Best Valentine
Earlier this week, like most young children, my eight year old son was busy preparing Valentine's Day cards to distribute at school. I'm so glad the schools still allow it, because it's such a nice little tradition.
Surprisingly, even with the Internet and text messaging, not much has changed about this ritual over the years. The students still make mailboxes to collect their cards, and they still write poems and print them on heart shaped construction paper.
Yet, there are some differences. For one, more Valentines are store bought these days and two, the children sometimes give out candy along with their cards. I don't remember that ever happening when I was a child, unless someone's mom baked cupcakes and brought them in.
Probably the biggest change the school has made to the old Valentine's Day is the new insistence that no child be excluded. The rule is, if you give a card to one person, you must give one to everybody. This, of course, creates another difference from our day in that, each classroom no longer has a child weeping on the floor in the fetal position because they only got one Valentine, and it was from the teacher.
This doesn't mean that school children no longer play favourites, because they do; they're just more subtle about how they do it. They give their 'special' Valentine's cards to the children they like best, and their leftovers go to the kid who picks his nose in class.
When I watched my son working on his cards, I noticed that he must have strong feelings for someone because he had one very nice Valentine set aside from the all the others.
"What's this one?" I asked.
"It's my favourite and I'm giving it to someone special," he answered.
"Ooh, who's it for?" I asked in a teasing manner.
A shy grin spread across his face and he hesitated to answer.
Seeing my normally talkative child suddenly silent I added, "Wow, you must really like this person."
His grin got larger, and he simply nodded.
It was obvious that he wasn't going to tell me who it was, so I thought it best to stop pestering him with questions. Instead...I grabbed the yearbook and started pointing to people, "Is it this one? This one? This one? This one? Betcha it's this one." (I never claimed to be mature.)
"Mom!" He groaned in exasperation.
I put the book away, but not before I flipped it open one last time "This one?"
He'd had enough. He gathered up his cards and left the room. I made a mental note to deposit more money in the therapy fund I started when he was four.
I established the fund after we told him that smiling as widely as possible would increase his chance of hitting the baseball when he was at bat. It was awfully cute at the little league games to see his massive, forced grin every time he approached the batters' box, but it was very, very wrong of us. I can admit that now.
It wasn't until hours after my torment that he finally felt comfortable to tell me about his special Valentine, and even then he didn't tell me face to face. He whispered it out of the corner of his mouth as he was walking by in the other direction. It felt a little bit like we were covert operatives sharing classified information.
"I'm giving it to myself," he said, "because I like me best."
The beauty of it left me speechless.
Like yourself best. Treat yourself like the special person you are.
Two simple but profound ideas that my son gave to me this Valentine's Day. If this keeps up, I may not need that therapy fund after all.
Crystal
Copyright 2007, Crystal Eves
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