Happy Valentines Day...I mean Happy Thursday

Ahh, Valentines Day. That one day of the year that people rush to the local retailers to spend way too much money on flowers, candy, teddy bears and jewelry. That biggest day of the year for reservation-only restaurants. Touristy monuments like the Eifel tower and the Empire State Building - anywhere that someone can get a nice view and sweet memories- are visited in droves in hopes of a romantic gesture. The one day of the year in which I can take a walk and see men on bended knees, proffering jewel-encrusted rings, on every other corner. Because there is no other day of the year in which love and devotion and romance can be expressed...right?

Can you tell I don't buy into it?

Valentine's Day is not a 'holiday' that makes its way onto my radar as an adult. I hesitate to even use the word holiday to describe it. It's nothing more than a made-up holiday created for commercialization. With or without a SO, I never cared all that much about this most monetized of all US holidays.

That doesn't mean I don't have good memories of Valentines Day though. It means something completely different to me.

Notice that I did mention at one point that I don't care for it as an adult.

My siblings and I didn't have the healthiest childhoods. The quote Cherry Valance form S.E Hinton's book The Outsiders, 'Things are tough all over'. That's nothing new and neither here nor there. It's almost trendy these days to have had a 'hard childhood', even if for some that meant they didn't get the newest model of Iphone for Christmas when they were sixteen.

My point with this is that even when things are rough there are usually good things. Some of my favorite memories growing up was Valentine's Day is of my father coming home from work, either in the late evening or early morning depending on which point in time it was and which job/shift he was working, with small gifts for his five kids. Usually heart-shaped boxes with candy and a small stuffed animal. Sometimes he switched it up but the theme was always the same.

My various friends through the years didn't have fathers who did this. It felt special. Meaningful. It wasn't about getting the gifts so much as the gesture behind it. My father was not the type to hand out endearments and affection willy-nilly so the small gestures were what meant something. To this very day, Valentines Day remains a special day of the year that my dad thought about us when most men, on that day, are scrambling to meet a SO's gestures of romanticism.

The last Valentines Day I got that fatherly gesture was when I was fifteen.

I've heard it said, and believe, that not everyone who is in your life is meant to stay.

Fathers are.

My dad is not dead but he is lost to me. Not everyone makes a good parent or even wants to be one; some want to be to the point that they become almost a collector of families, in a sense, or feel that when they've screwed up badly enough with one they can scrap it like a failed experiment and try again with new subjects.

People aren't perfect and neither are lives.

But even when there is nothing else to hold onto, those types of memories are what can make me smile and remember fondly the years that had very little to be fond of.

These days, as a grown woman in my middle ages, my mom is still presenting her grown adult kids with little velvet flowers, tiny teddy bears and a handful of chocolate symbols of her love on Valentines Day, but it is just the garnish on her daily 'I love you' and frequent gestures.

Valentines Day is meaningless to me as the romanticized commercial holiday but that doesn't mean it has no meaning for me at all.