Real-world Thoughts on Valentines Day
Commentary from Trudy W. Schuett --
There were a lot of Valentine’s Day stories in the news. I didn’t get to most of them because at our house, Valentine’s Day is the big day when we do something cool and fantastic to remind each other that this is a loving family, and it’s just as nice to do something for somebody else as it is to get something good.
This is the way I explained it to my then-preschool son, Sean, twenty years ago. That Valentine’s Day times were tough, money was short, the weather was bad, Daddy and Mom were hardly speaking, and yet somehow, Mom figured out how to make Daddy a Valentine anyway. I remember that day pretty clearly – we had a house in Detroit with a basement and an upstairs, and I spent a lot of time bouncing up and down stairs looking for red fabric, red yarn, red anything, or maybe some lace stuff off a shirt from the Halloween closet. I was going to make a Valentine out of whatever we had, by golly. I didn’t have any money , and besides there was two feet of snow on the ground that year.
I gritted my teeth in anger while knitting part of the Valentine, I know, and all day I kept asking myself why I was even bothering to do this. In those days all my husband did was going to work, and then coming home long after Sean was in bed. Weekends sometimes we never saw him at all, when he was out doing extra jobs or maybe hanging out with his friends. We weren’t talking much, so who knew?
We had this nascent tradition, if such a thing is possible, anyway. Long before we were a married couple with a baby, we had silly, funny, things associated with the big day. When we were dating, Paul made a heart-shaped pizza by just getting a regular pizza and carving it out, and eating the evidence. He didn’t realize he was being watched by a couple of my girl pals who happened to be in-house at the time…
Hey, remember this was 1973!
We still had romance then.
Even sans Dad, in the troubled times, Sean and I started to do things for Valentine’s Day. We figured out how make practically anything we cooked heart-shaped, spurred on by our little boy back then wanting to do things to make Daddy happy. I thought my husband was unreachable, but Sean always wanted to make a heart-shaped cooky, a heart-shaped bagel, or whatever we were making that day.
I said why not.
Even if the parents weren’t on the best of terms, there wasn’t any reason why a boy couldn’t let his dad know he loved him. There is something special between a man and his children that has nothing to do with the marriage relationship. It’s true the other way, as well. Mothers have a different relationship with their children.
I knew this, and so I helped my little boy make hearts out of such silly stuff as carrots and cookies , even when the situation between myself and my husband was terrible. No matter what the situation was between myself and my husband, as an adult it was my responsibility to see that the rift in the marriage did not effect our child.
As things worked out, we weathered the storm, and now have celebrated our 30th anniversary. This is not and should not ever be anything unusual. Many of the couples of my generation have done the same. Nearly all of my parent’s generation did. My own parents were married for 61 years, separated only when my mother passed in 1993.
Marriage is about a long term commitment to helping each other, man and woman, through all the crap that happens. It is not about having your needs met, it is not about quality time. It is not about validating yourself as anything from crop duster to mother.
It is about caring enough for yourself and another human being to teach yourself to trust the process. Learning anything is quite difficult; even something like a class in conversational Spanish is going to be beyond the limits for some. Yet if you are in a marriage, no matter how you got there, be it from a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas when you were stoned beyond reason, to a full-boat ritual in church or shul with all the trappings – it’s still about taking care of each other through everything.
Marriage is not a vehicle. It is not a means to an end. The only thing that happens after you say, “I do,” is that now you are responsible for the other person, in terms of doing the best you can to make their life better and more secure.
When you have done the best you can and learn to honestly consider your spouse’s needs, then you most likely will have one of those long-term marriages. If considering another’s needs is too difficult for you, then please don’t bother. Marriage is not for wimps.
If you’re looking to dissolve your marriage because you’re miserable and nothing seems to be working, I want to warn you. The solutions offered by society today are far worse than any marriage. Your children, if any, will no longer be your own. Their fate is decided by the state once you file for divorce. There will be times you have little or no say in what happens to them.
In fact, you will have little or no say in what happens to you, once you give your marriage over to the government.
People don’t realize what is actually happening in a divorce. The laws are now so invasive that the people choosing to dissolve a marriage have very little control over what happens to their lives after that initial filing. You can’t ever get it back, either.
I’m willing to bet that most often, dear Brianna or Tiffany really aren’t out to destroy the children or the neglectful husband. Despite the number of times you’ve been told how liberating and empowering divorce is, the actual fact is that it sucks big time.
Nobody actually ever gets over it. You will never be at peace with the decision.
I can say that because I had one of the first no-fault divorces. My ex and I went to court and went to lunch after, in a totally equitable intention. He paid the costs because he knew I wouldn’t have the money. I didn’t ask for any money or anything from him, because that’s not the way the new idea of “feminism “ was supposed to be.
Back then, a woman choosing divorce also expected to take on the full responsibility of supporting herself and her children. How hard is that to understand?
I have always regretted my divorce, mostly because my son from my later marriage is possibly smarter than my first husband. Which would take some doing! These guys need to get together!
Steven Silberberg, are you out there?