true love stories never have endings

i kind-of got sidetracked for a few days and forgot about my pledge to tell you all about my 2008 valentine.

she's sweet.
she's sassy.
she's one of the smartest women i know.
she is creative, innovative, brilliant, hilarious, a skilled flipcup player, and a legend in her own mind.
...and it doesn't hurt that i like waking up with her every morning, even when she's grumpy and hungover.

my 2008 valentine is ME!
it's not like it was easy to get myself to agree to be mine. i spent the first month and the half of the year courting me. i signed me up for a gym membership (and already lost 2-6 pounds, depending on which scale you trust), i bought me books (and read them to myself), i fed me pre-natal vitamins to strengthen my hair and nails, i went out of my way to drive me to acupuncture appointments, and i dragged me to glide each and every sunday morning.

i did everything in my power to make me happy, and it worked. i am officially "in a relationship," and that relationship is with me.

i hope that everyone else out there considers making themselves their belated valentines too. after all, the most important person for you to love is yourself. hey - don't take my word for it...take whitney houston's.



although i previously issued a statement proclaiming that i don't much care for valentine's day, because it's a holiday of obligation and not one of love, i always end up thinking about love anyways because messages of love (whether sincere or not) are omnipresent.

for me, love has always been defined by the acceptance of imperfections. more than a few overflowing handfuls of people have told me that they love their siblings, but that they will never have the same kind of relationship with them that i have with mine. most of those people have never even MET any of my siblings. here's a little secret: my sisters and i are hugely imperfect, and we have imperfect relationships with each other. as a matter of fact, we fight all the time. we fight about things as stupid as facebook comments and things as important as who gets to have the center spot in photographs. we fight and fight and fight, but those fights don't impede our ability to accept and forgive each other's imperfections and to love each other fiercely and unconditionally.

if we can't forgive other people's imperfections, how can we expect them to forgive ours? . . . and we are all gloriously imperfect creatures.

in the spirit of imperfect love, i dedicated this valentine's day to one of my 3 aunt and uncle teams. married for about 7 or 8 years, my aunt and uncle divorced in the early 80s. i remember my aunt, devastated beyond belief, drove herself and her children to nova scotia to stay with her sister (my mom) for a few weeks to help her recover. on one particular evening, they were both drunk and they stood up on the porch railing of our victorian gingerbread house BELTING out the lyrics to dolly parton's song "hard candy christmas," which is about pushing through the bad times and starting over fresh. they drank into the night and sang until their voices gave out. it's probably their fault that canadians think americans are insane.

20 years and 2 or 3 collective divorces later, my aunt and uncle fell back in love and moved in together. actually, i'm not sure "fell back in love," is true, because i have my doubts that they were ever out of love. it might have just taken 20 years for them to fully appreciate each other's imperfections. my aunt, for example, can not STAND it when someone turns the TV off and leaves it on any channel other than CNN. i've seen her scream at the top of her lungs over it, because she insists she doesn't know how to change the channel back. my uncle, on the other hand, has a tendency to both womanize and drink until he smashes his head into a plaster wall or locks himself out of a hotel room buck naked after peeing in a plant in the corner of the room, thinking it was a toilet. just like everyone else on the planet, they're messes. luckily, they're messes who stopped fighting the fact that they're messes who belong to each other.

as cynical as i sometimes seem, i'm ultimately an incurable optimist who believes that love is a force far beyond human control. you can walk away from it (and people often do), but it skulks around the perimeters of your mind. it haunts your daydreams. it lurks in the shadows of your memories, waiting impatiently for a vulnerable moment to make an unexpected reappearance. my aunt and uncle give me hope that everything ends exactly the way it is supposed to...sometimes you just have to wait until the timing is right.

as the old cowboy proverb says: timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.