This morning I woke up to the sound of my alarm ringing at 4:45am, just like any other day. I took a deep breath and cringed as my blankets were pulled back and the cold air embraced my body. In the dark, I scrambled to tie up my housecoat and find some semblance of a clean outfit amongst the clothes strewn haphazardness around my bedroom. I snuck out of the bedroom as quietly as a lumbering 30-week pregnant woman can so as not to disturb my sleeping husband. Just like any other day.

Except today, the man I left in the bed beside me is my Valentine.

Today probably won’t be my favourite Valentine’s Day ever. Now that I am pregnant, there will be no bottles of wine. Now that we are parents, there will be no romantic date. Now that the transit strike has us working opposite hours, we will not only have to forgo the lunch date we planned, but I will hardly see my husband all day.

But is that really what Valentine’s Day is about? The wine? The diners out? The abundance of gifts I’m sure will be waiting for me when I get home (right? right?!)? Maybe. Maybe that is what Valentine’s Day comprises of. But that isn’t what Valentine’s Day is really about. Not at all.

Valentine’s Day can be a contentious holiday. To some, it is all that is wrong with the marketing machine and commercialism. To others, it is a painful reminder of what they don’t have. Still others see it as a loophole to acting unloving to your partner every other day of the year.

To me, it is all about loving. Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be about the money spent or the loneliness felt. And it certainly doesn’t diminish acts of love shown on other days of the year. Valentine’s Day is about seeking out those people in your life who are important to you and making sure that they feel loved. It is about giving our love, without, necessarily, expecting anything back in return. It is a reminder that love, in essence, is an act and not a passive experience.

Lately, I have not been very good at loving the person I should be loving most of all. I committed my life to a man, and instead, my life seems to have taken hold of me. My focus is always on the next task I should be accomplishing and because of that, I often don’t even see this person I am sharing my life with. Often, on my way to go do something very important, I rush right by Dan only to have him stop me and wrap his arms around me. “There.” He says, “Isn’t that nice? It is good to pretend to love your husband every once in a while.”

I am sure we have all gotten to this point in our relationships. That point where we suck at showing love. Perhaps emotions get in the way and we are too hurt or angry to focus on actively loving. Or maybe we are stuck in a cycle of selfishly desiring love instead of realizing that perhaps our spouse needs love too. For me, life gets in the way. Everything I love – my child, my passions, my desire to check things off a list – gets in the way of the one I chose to love.

So this is why Valentine’s Day is so great. This is why I am so thrilled that our society has embraced a day all about love. Because once a year, something chubby and diapered and only half as cute as my son shoots and arrow right in the middle of our relationships and reminds us to turn up the love volume. And even if your relationship is full of fireworks and rainbows on February 13th, it never hurts to try a little harder to show the people in our lives how much we love them.

Don’t wallow in self-pitty today. Don’t count the amount of dollars spent. Don’t just be loving today on this one day. Pick out those people in your life who mean everything to you and love them better. Valentine’s Day is a reminder to love. Today. Tomorrow. Every day. Maybe you don’t need that reminder. I do.

What my husband and son woke up to. I hope they know how desperately I love them.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MommysMiracle/~3/mjZDcfRJ-eg/any-other-day.html