I’m not crazy about Valentine’s Day.
I’m not crazy about Mother’s Day either – or any day that singles out an emotion like romantic love and/or parenting prowess.
If my family’s response to these two holidays doesn’t meet my expectations, I get depressed.
Then I get angry.
Then I start questioning whether I am I a great
mother or partner
or even an adequate partner or mother.
Then I start going down the list of all the things that I THINK make me a great partner and a great mother. And I get frazzled to think that maybe my husband and sons simply don’t recognize my innate worth centered around these two pivotal roles. 🙂
Lack of acknowledgement in the rigid way I yearn to be acknowledged does me in every time.
I’m doing some pivotal and interventional maneuvers when it comes to this Valentine’s Day so this totally self-destructive cycle does not repeat itself again.
A few years back, my husband and I went out to a very cool local place that has a great coffee bar and tea bar surrounded by lovely and serene gardens. We pretended we were just meeting for the first time. And we carried this charade along when we dealt with the waitress too.
What did this mean?
Well, if we were meeting for the first time, I obviously couldn’t get irritated with him right off the bat when he announced to me that he had forgotten to bring his reading glasses – leaving him unable to decipher the menu – which meant I would need to literally read him the selections.
What else did it mean? If we were meeting for the first time, I couldn’t abruptly ask him to change the subject when he kept focusing on the book he was reading about historical events leading up to World War 1 because I wanted the conversation to take a more personal turn.
Soooo on our contrived late afternoon date, what would I need to do? Pull up my big girl pants, turn on the charm while searching in my arsenal of folders in my brain for questions that would yield answers to what kind of person he was and whether I would be interested in having more dates with him.
That’s what I did and here are the questions I came up with:
What ability would you like to have that you don’t?
If you had one year to live, what would you change?
What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment?
What in your life do you feel most grateful for?
If you had a crystal ball, what would you like to know?
What is your favorite thing to do?
What constitutes a perfect day?
What would you plan for a dream date night?
Here’s my suggestion for this upcoming Valentine’s Day:
· Schedule a late afternoon coffee date or wine date or dessert date on Valentine’s Day or one of the days close to it.
· Do what I did with my husband, with your husband, partner or romantic love interest.
The upside is you may learn things about your husband, partner or romantic love interest that you never knew.
The upside is you will have taken some measure of control to assure that Valentine’s Day is as pleasurable as you have always imagined it could be.
Keep Preserving Your Bloom,
