Valentine’s Day 02/12/2010

I thought I knew what love was, and then I had a baby.

In elementary school, it was brown lunch bags decorated with pink construction paper. We slipped hand scrawled single face cards, accompanied by hard, chalky candy hearts, into classmates’ sacks and giggled. In later years, when the cards weren’t mandatory, they became the trophies of that week’s most popular girls and boys. They always meant the same thing. To our young minds, they meant love.

Love came and went, was at first sight or learned, and was often accompanied by tears. It was a feeling, both physical and emotional, sometimes consecutively and sometimes not. The fact that I still remember the name of the boy who first kissed me and where we were and what the weather was like is not unusual. I was certain on that day that I knew what love was.

Love is a lot of things. But until I had a baby, I didn’t know how many things it was.

You know the feeling, right? As a mom, reading this? You’ve just been through a physical pain like you’ve never known and pushed an alien being from your body, and you love that baby so immediately and completely that you would do anything for it. Love. Love like you’ve never known.

Valentine’s Day is the day that we celebrate love. On Wikipedia, it’s defined in this way: Saint Valentine’s Day (commonly shortened to Valentine’s Day) is an annual holiday  held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions.

Before I had a baby, I thought that Valentine’s Day was about romantic love, but I consider the definition. For who have I been more intimate with than my children? They came into the world yelling at me, red and slippery, and then quieted at my breast. I loved them when I cleaned the messy folds of their skin, and I loved them when they drooled onto my shoulder and when their diapers leaked onto my lap. When they cut new teeth and when they smiled for the first time. And they loved me, even when I came to their crib at 5am, without make-up and hair a mess, and they thought I was beautiful. I sang to them without reserve, toneless and tuneless, and they loved me then, too. We have cried together when a pet died, been sick together, and we laugh at the same bad jokes. We have shared every birthday.

I have helped my children decorate their own brown paper bags for school valentines, and I know whose cards they treasure. To them, Valentine’s Day is about romantic love. Someday, when they have children, they will learn.

I thought I knew what love was, and then I had a baby.

And then I knew what love was.

– Julie Clark, Founder & Mom