Tag Archive for: Valentine’s Day

Love Post for Valentine’s Day (but not Romantic or Partnered Love)

, , , , , , , , ,

photo of a beach with a strand of seaweed forming a heart shape

A few months ago, I was talking with a friend and I whispered, “I don’t have a felt sense of being loved. Is that weird?” I whispered it because it felt weird. It felt wrong somehow. Like there was something wrong with me.

Before she could say anything, I quickly spoke again – this time a little louder. “I mean, cognitively, I know I am loved. I have amazing people in my life who I know love me. But I don’t have a trusted, grounded sense of it in my body. In my ‘Self,’ if that makes sense.”

“Oh, Kar. Honey. I’m sorry.”

It was a low point. But also, if you know me, this won’t come as a surprise, it was a bit of a call to action. Because I’ve spent so much time in the last few years developing the Grief and Rage work and tuning into my body to reconnect my brain, body, and spirit, I began to feel like it was important to pay more attention to that. Have I ever had a felt sense of love? Not that I recall. Have I always wanted one? Yes. But I don’t know if that is because it represents security to me or something else.

Most people I know would describe me as a loving person and I do work to let people know I care about them in a myriad of different ways. It used to be a frantic, ‘if I give you this thing (love), you’ll have to give it back to me’ sort of program, but when I had kids it shifted to a much more pure ‘I love you because you exist on the face of the planet’ thing. And the more I dove into community care and read things like bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, the more I exercised the muscle of extending unconditional love to everyone around me.

I recently experienced a relationship rupture with someone I cared about very deeply and it was a rich learning experience, for sure. I was hurt and sad and angry and very, very confused. I alternated between reliving some of the sweet, tender times we shared, the laughter and conversations, and being really busy so that my mind was filled with tasks and plans for work. But one night before bed, I began to wonder if I could really walk my talk on unconditional love. I asked myself whether I could simply hold this person in my heart in tenderness and care because of those lovely moments we shared without following threads of what might have come before or how the rupture occurred. Could I just purely open my heart and let this person be held there, period? I asked the question and then went to sleep.

I woke up once in the middle of the night to song lyrics playing in my head that made me smile, and when I woke up in the morning, I knew the answer was yes. It isn’t in my nature to not find a way to love people (is that a Libra thing? Maybe). It’s not an invitation to reconnect without repair, but that is the part where I show myself love, and in the past few weeks, my capacity for self-love has grown enormously. I might even say I am beginning to have a felt sense of my own self-love.

But the question that came to me this morning is whether I actually DO have a felt sense of love in my body and I just haven’t allowed myself to access it. What if it is there and I just have to open myself to the possibility of feeling it? It’s entirely possible that I closed myself off from it because, as a kid, adults would say the words “I love you” and pair them with behaviors and actions that didn’t match. It was confusing and likely easier for me as a child to ignore what I was feeling in my body. When someone says “I love you” and then they physically harm you, how is one supposed to interpret that? When someone says “I love you” and then they shame you or proceed to tell you all the ways you are actually unlovable, where does that land in the body?

Over the years, I have had friendships with people who said “I love you” and then hugged me or acknowledged my gifts or expressed gratitude for me. Is it possible that those things also landed in my body and I just didn’t recognize it or I haven’t discovered yet where they live in me? I know what it feels like to extend love, that warm rush of energy from my heart and belly to another. It is not outside of the realm of possibility that I just haven’t paid much attention to what it feels like coming back to me because it isn’t something I’ve cultivated.

This is probably the strangest Valentine’s Day post I’ve ever written, but in the interest of keeping it real, I wanted to share my belief that love isn’t as complicated as we think it is. It is a body thing, a spiritual thing, no matter how much we try to make it a head thing. Learning to open myself up to where love lives in my physical body, what it feels like as I send it out, where I am intuitively driven to love, and what that energy feels like without parsing it out or analyzing it in my head has given me the knowledge that love just flows. It just is. My attempts to explain it and qualify it (romantic love versus platonic love, love that is “right” or “enough”) and justify it actually interrupt that flow. If I just open myself to the possibility of love, it is there. And it is transformational.

I hope you are feeling loved, today and every day.

Hangin’ in the Kitchen with Lola

I don’t generally post many photos on my blog, but today I have to. You see, on Tuesday, Lola and I had our Second Annual Valentine’s Day Cook-Fest. This is the second year in a row that her mid-winter break from school falls during Valentine’s week, and since Eve and Bubba are stuck in their regular routine, Lola thought it would be cool for us to concoct a feast for them. She is my little chemist, so for her, cooking is fun. So is making a godawful mess in the kitchen.

As soon as we dropped Eve off at her carpool meet-up point, we headed home to start baking. First on tap, the flourless chocolate cake. Lola delighted in using the biggest, sharpest knife we own to shred an enormous block of chocolate. She also loved licking her fingers and swiping them across the counter to pick up rogue bits that had leaped off of the cutting board. Separating eggs is fun, too. Since she used her fingers to filter out the yolks and got to be “all slimy.” Whipping egg whites was harder than she anticipated, so I stepped in to save the day, but she insisted on being the one to fold them in to the mixture at the end.

Once the cake was in the oven, we got to move on to our next dish – gluten-free potstickers. We discovered this recipe last year and it was such a hit that we knew we had to do it again. We also remembered how much work it was, so we bought some rice paper wrappers to make spring rolls with the leftover filling. Mixing dough was a riot – Lola loves to get her hands in there and squish it all together. She had a ball chopping chicken and cabbage and green onions and, later, rolling out the dough and pressing it in the tortilla press.

Then it was time to make the broth for pho. We roasted spices with onion and garlic and ginger under the broiler and put it in the crock pot with broth to steep all day long. The last few photos are of the table Lola set, the noodles and beef just before we poured the boiling broth over the top, Lola rolling a spring roll, and the fabulous flourless chocolate cake.



I already know that next year, Valentine’s Day won’t fall during mid-winter break, but Lola and I have decided to make this a tradition (and Bubba and Eve aren’t complaining – they were looking forward to dinner all day long). Although we made an unholy mess of the kitchen, I don’t remember when I’ve had more fun and I’m already looking forward to next year’s adventures in the kitchen.

Valentine’s Day is My New Favorite Holiday


I have decided that I think Valentine’s Day ought to be bigger than it is. No, I don’t work for Hallmark or Future Florists of America or even Theo Chocolates.

As a kid I loved Valentine’s Day. I can remember hand-picking which store-bought card went to which kid, lamenting over the excessive number of “Be Mine” messages since there were so few boys I wanted to send that particular card to. The construction-paper-decorated shoeboxes and certain knowledge that I would receive more than my fair share of Hershey’s kisses, along with the party that kept us from doing any work all afternoon were indeed something to look forward to.
As a teen, my perspective on this holiday was based on whether or not I was currently dating anyone. If so, I was thrilled to have someone who would “be mine,” and a little nervous about what exactly to give a teenage boy for Valentine’s Day. If I was single, I sought solace in my other single girlfriends and we tried our hardest to avoid looking at the couples exchanging soulful looks and stealing kisses.
As a mother, I questioned the commercialism of the day, especially when the decorations went up on January 1st at our local drugstores. I encouraged the girls to craft their own cards for family members and schoolmates, but we all quickly ran out of patience with the glitter and glue and trying to find unique messages for each recipient.
One year when I just couldn’t get it together to mail Christmas cards out on time, I found a sweet photo of Eve and Lola and ordered Valentine’s cards for all the families on my Christmas card list. I think that was when it occurred to me that I had been limiting my notion of Valentine’s Day unnecessarily.
Then I met Carrie. She is the embodiment of love. She is funny, honest, blunt, open and a true gift in my life. And her birthday is February 14th. And that was my tipping point.
I still craft special sentiments for Bubba and the girls every Valentine’s Day. But I have expanded my celebration of February 14 to include every person in my life that I love. I am embracing Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to stop and recognize how rich and full of love my life actually is. It isn’t about sending cards or gifts to everyone I know, and more about stopping several times throughout the day to think fondly of my friends and family and consciously send love out into the Universe. And that is why I think Valentine’s Day ought to be bigger than it is. What if Valentine’s Day was about love, period? Romantic love, platonic love, love of self, all of it. As far as I’m concerned, that makes it much more important than St. Patrick’s Day. And I’m married to an Irishman…