A Matriarch's Valentine to Her Family
A little discourse on how this lovely day and minor holidays like it can be used to weave together a genuine family culture strong enough to hold you and your loved ones fast.
I’ve been distracted lately—finishing multiple articles for publications like Claremont Review of Books, Chronicles, the American Mind, and Fairer Disputations—but we can’t let St. Valentine’s Day go by without a post!
Why make such a fuss over Valentine’s Day, when we have only just begun to recover from the Mom Olympics? I use Valentine’s Day to teach my children how to love people.
My understanding of both how to love and how to accept love from others was fashioned by my mother, and her mother before her, and I suspect her mother before her. As a convert to Catholicism at age 20, I have had some uphill battles in absorbing and creating a mostly alien Catholic culture for my children.
But Valentine’s Day is not alien, because my mother was a high school teacher, and oftentimes teachers are the absolute masters of celebrating small holidays, right down to the classroom decor.
In this area, at least, I can rely on second nature. My mom did it, so imitation seems natural. Second nature is the most useful tool in the Matriarch’s bag of tricks, because the things we do habitually without thought or effort make up about 85% of our parenting. It is possible to convert to new religions, and it is even possible to marry into a different culture. But each person only has so much bandwidth to reinvent the wheel. The best you can do is pick 2-3 major areas of life to completely make up from scratch for your own children and family, because the rest of it will need to be automatic.
I tolerate, to a certain extent, the “Love Languages” understanding of love that has taken over American culture. I find the love languages concept to be about as irritating as the whole “introvert” “extrovert” discussion but, ok. Sure. It’s probably true that people love and recognize love in different wavelengths.
Yet alongside our sophisticated theories of how to love and how to recognize tokens of love, we should remember that children live in the sturdy world of the physical body, and most of adult love language/personality test culture is hogwash to them. They have not yet learned to value unseen and disembodied things more than the physical wonders right in front of them, and thank God for that. So we must resist the urge to donate to a foreign charity or plant a tree far away in our children’s names for Valentine’s Day. We must table doing “acts of service” with our children for Valentine’s Day because they hate that and because nothing conveys love to them like a box of chalky, teeth-shattering, 99-cent conversation hearts.
Kids want things, and they love to be surprised by things. I think you can go a step further and give them something that they will immediately recognize as a thing that was thoughtfully selected just for them, because they take an interest in a certain hobby, or color, or object. In addition to recognizing the physical nature of children, we need to remind ourselves that children have a really poor understanding of the passing of time, of which holiday comes before or after which birthday, and indeed of whether it is breakfast or dinnertime upon waking from their afternoon nap.
This is why most children go insane with joy over seasonal decor, because they have trouble placing themselves in time, and they find great delight in foreknowledge and anticipation of a happy event. If you hang some paper hearts on the wall before Valentine’s Day, they will remember exactly what that signifies next year, and every year thereafter.
Speaking of thinking about other people and the way they wish to be loved, I suspect there are many husbands out there who, like mine, would prefer to not spend money and indeed find it physically and psychologically painful to have their own-ish money lavished upon them in a display of love. For husbands such as these, we can make potato salad and cheesecake. Most people who abhor gifts do not reject food, I’ve found.
Now of course, inevitably, some will object that so much holiday effort should not be dispensed upon either children or husbands who fail to return affection in kind. I cannot help you with this problem; the reasons for maternal depression and burnout are myriad. But on the surface, this strategy of withholding love until we first receive sufficient amounts seems iffy at best. I think the mother teaches the family how to love, and that role is there for us to perform, whether or not we had it performed for us in our own youth.
If we sit ourselves down and really think about it, we can come up with something to do to mark the passing of time, and the diminishing of the number of days we have left with all our children at home, and let whatever feelings of exhaustion or bitterness that come alongside Valentine’s Day just lie there, as they are. Building an adequate home culture for our children, teaching them to love, is essential for their development whether or not we feel equal to the task.
Three of my five children will be in high school next year. I’ve realized that time really does go by too fast to capture or to hold; we are all like the toddler who wakes up from his afternoon nap expecting breakfast. For my own sake, I celebrate these little holidays and I take pictures and I go all out, because doing so also helps me mark the passing of time. I don’t want to regret not doing stuff while my kids were little.
My husband remarked one Valentine’s Day eve, early on, that it was kind of silly of me to do all these things for a minor holiday and you know, he’s not wrong. Like my mother before me, I am a fool for my children on Valentine’s Day.
But consider: it’s an easy way to imprint myself upon my children’s minds for all these little and big days of the year. Not a Valentine’s Day will go by for their entire lives where they don’t at least think of me. I know because I think of my mom every year, and how she always did fun stuff for us. Little things, faithfully, year after year. And now I always get her a Valentine, I always make her an Easter basket, and I always get her birthday and Christmas trinkets. It’s just a way of having continuity through the generations and sort of keeping yourself present in your kids’ minds after they are grown.
All of this is easier if you have an established family tradition to piggy back on. Reinventing the wheel takes a lot of energy and focus. Copying is second nature
My mom always left Valentines for us on the breakfast table that morning so that’s what I do. My husband makes us all pink pancakes or heart-shaped food and we have a little feast. I go to places like antique stores or local five-and-dimes throughout the year and collect intriguing things, knickknacks and curios, and maintain a little kid and hostess gift stash for whatever occasion requires it. Sometimes if my stash is low I make a batch of rice crispy treats and wrap them individually in wax paper with little stickers and ribbons. Something about batch cooking done individually in large families makes kids go insane with joy.
For little kids you can just go to the grocery store and get them the cheap bubbles or a measuring tape or paints. My sons have gone absolutely insane over the little 3x5 notebooks grocery stores carry because they think they are spy or scientist’s journals.
We have such a short time with our children. Why not get them some bubbles and make them some special little things? Why not go nuts for them? I do not think efforts like these spoil children; because as my kids have grown, I have noticed they imitate what I do, and buy things and make special things for their friends and loved ones. They do not expect to be the recipient forever, but instead aspire to be the giver.
Family culture is what kids remember, what holds them fast throughout life, and it will be what they seek to recreate for themselves when they have their own families. I will be there with them in all of it, infused into every holiday, an absolute fool for them. As my mother was for me.
My mom also went a little nuts for Valentine’s Day, but man do I love those memories. And I do the same for my kids and they look forward to it every year! Thanks for the encouragement and reminder that the physical world is indeed what matters most to kids.
You are quite helpful when it comes to explaining the practicals and the whys behind these things. It may seem simple, but is an enormous boon to us younger parents who may not have the muscle memory to draw from. Thank you.