Ah, February. The month of love. Spare me. Always my least favourite holiday, Valentine’s Day, edging out New Year’s Day by a whisker. Both holidays of forced expression of love, or joy, both awkward for the singletons at the party or restaurant, surrounded by the coupled.
Except that now I have children, and all of the holidays have taken on a pretty great tone. I’ve just come upstairs from making strawberry jello. Knox Blox, to be more precise, a fantastically sugared recipe involving four boxes of jello and three envelopes of gelatin and put into the fridge to harden. And when the girls wake from their naps we’ll go down and use the heart-shaped cookie cutter to press out palm-sized jello hearts, eating the scraps from between the hearts with our fingers. With three sachets of gelatin mixed in, this is jello you can eat with your hands. Sweet, red, jiggling hearts, a symbol if there ever was one of how my attitude to a holiday has changed now that I have someone I love with whom to share it.
There is in contemporary culture a creeping backlash against making motherhood the be-all and end-all of life. Of defining ourselves by our status as mothers. It is a throwback to the housewife years, or so the theory is, a bucking of all the years of feminism that was supposed to have taught us that there is life beyond the kitchen, purpose beyond that of raising well-behaved (or at least well-groomed) children. Well, duh. I know there is purpose beyond my household – I work full-time and have no spouse to help define me. So I’m the woman of the house, and the man, the maker of jello and the fixer of toilets, and I bring home the bacon and cook it, both. I spend enough time away from my children to hold down a full-time job, and so mother is just one title on my resume.
But, let’s be honest. I do pretty much define myself by motherhood right now. And the love. The insane love that is involved is overwhelming. The love for my children makes me love Valentine’s Day. I see the paper hearts adorning our neighbor’s window, and it makes me eager for the girls to wake up so we can make some for our own window. Is it too early to buy doilies? Shall I save that for next year? In the early years of these holidays, I’ve found it is easy to go too far, to use up all the best tricks before the toddler and the preschooler even know there can be more than a pink heart and a red heart and a white heart. Jello is enough for this year – we can save the pink cookies and the pink milk for next year, or the year after that. (The pink milk I get from my mother. I distinctly remember the surprise and pleasure and pride of finding milk in my school thermos one year on February 14.)
I know the cupid with the bow and arrow had romantic love in mind. I know Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about couples, hand in hand, starry eyed over truffles and champagne. Or something. But frankly, I have a hard time believing romantic love is any match for the love between a mother and a new baby, a mother and a giggling toddler, a mother and a wondrous preschooler. My elder is just at that age where her hand reaches for mine automatically when we cross the street, her fingers slipping into mine as unconsciously as a dream. How good is that? And the toddler is at the age where she loves my body as her own. She caresses me, pats me, traces my eyebrows and my clavicle, looking for her landmarks. She thinks I’m beautiful and her newest word: “snuggle” is a demand that involves just her and me. How good is that?
And so, Valentine’s Day, and February. A month I once could do without, now filled with activities for the loves of my life. I know some women love their partners more than their children – or at least I’ve read about such a thing. I just can’t imagine it.