My Valentine

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing... its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.- Dolly Alderton

I famously don’t like winter. It is grey, and dark, and cold, and wet. These adjectives are part of the reason why I love Valentine’s Day.

January is the longest month of the year, and March holds the promise of spring but the reality is that it remains bleak and somehow colder than the months that preceded it. But February!

February is short! February has a school holiday! And February has Valentine’s Day! A moment of bright pink and red, a moment to drink champagne, a moment of joy.

My mom made a big deal of Valentine’s Day for us growing up - not in the way people on Instagram seem to do now, giving big presents or baskets to kids, but simply infusing the day with a sense of the extra special. And while it felt like a day of delight for us kids, it was also a day of overt romance for my parents. I’m lucky to have grown up with parents who not only had a strong marriage as partners who respect each other and modeled the type of love that you see in many long term relationships, but who intentionally maintained romantic love throughout their entire marriage. Valentine’s Day was - is - not a day to roll one’s eyes at in my household. My dad would buy (and still buys) three or four cards for my mom because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best. Flowers were non-negotiable. They always had plans. My mom dressed to the nines. And the best part about this example of romance was that it wasn’t just a show for a cheesy holiday - they did this regularly, and just went sprinkled a little bit more on February 14.

The IB curriculum that I work in allows for a lot of flexibility with the content that we teach, because it’s a concept based curriculum and the exams are mostly skills based. I am on an evergreen quest to bring more joy into what we teach, to make sure our students know that for something to be "worthy” literature it doesn’t have to be depressing, boring, or traumatic. We’re in the process of writing a new unit for our two year DP course (the equivalent of a junior-senior course) that will take the entire term for our higher level classes. The unit is called “Defining the Undefinable: Love in Language and Literature”.

As we go through the term, we’re exploring the idea that love is simultaneously the most individual and universal experience humanity has. This paradox is the question that writers have been exploring as long as we have been writing. We’re considering the two main IB concepts of creativity and communication as we ask why certain forms (like Pablo Neruda’s poetry, for example) seem to be more natural avenues for literary writers to explore the feelings of love, as well as exploring the difference between truth and artifice in the telling of a love story when authors adhere to genre versus becoming formulaic (with romantic comedies - we’re watching When Harry Met Sally next week).

I started teaching it two weeks ago, timed perfectly for the first week of February. My teenagers rolled their eyes at my enthusiasm, at the amount of cheese I brought to the first class. Class begin with a creative writing exercise, students writing down what came to mind what they thought love smelt, sounded, tasted, felt, and looked like - the eye rolling ceased pretty immediately when I told them no one was obligated to share, and more than one set of cheeks had a blush as they answered the prompts. I had 22 teenagers submit the most romantic song they could think of and added them all to a playlist - the choices ranged from Chopin to Bruno Mars to Frankie Valli to Mac Miller.

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is. - Anaïs Nin

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality. - Charles Bukowski

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. - William Shakespeare

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything. - Katharine Hepburn

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. - Louis de Bernières

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall. - Dolly Alderton

I put these quotes up on the board, asking my kids what they noticed, what they had in common, what they agreed with or disagreed with. Immediately they noticed that no one is able to actually give a tangible definition to love - they all had to speak in figurative language, but that in doing so, they’d all come to some sort of a truth.

This week, we examined letters as a text type - specifically, love letters. My students poured over them, riveted by the yearning, the double meanings when love was dangerous, the passion. I joked to them about the fact that my darling (and genuinely very romantic) husband, with whom I was long distance for three years, somehow never wrote me a love letter, and that I hoped my lesson plan would help guide him through the process for Valentine’s Day this year.

That brings me to this morning. Stay with me.

The Bug is now quite big, and biking with her in a normal (non electric) bike in a front bike seat is really cumbersome and exhausting. There’s an app in Amsterdam called BAQME that allows you to rent a bakfiets - an electric box bike - by the hour. A box bike is literally a bike with a box on it. The child sits in the box (it has seatbelts) and you ride it like a normal bicycle. The rentable bikes are stationed all over the city, and we have one that’s permanently stationed literally less than 10 feet from our from door. It’s very convenient! The Bug and I have really become bakfiets girlies.

This morning we had plans to meet up with some pals in de Pijp. We dropped off some Valentines she’d made this week en route, grabbed coffee and croissants, and ended up in a Montessori playroom without anyone to share it with for two and a half hours - glorious.

I pushed our morning to the limit, knowing the electric bakfiets could get us home quickly, that I’d shovel shrimp in the Bug’s mouth and then put her down for her nap a bit late, that it was worth it to have so much fun with our friends. I shoved her into her winter suit, her boots, scooped her up, and headed out to my handy dandy rented bike.

Except.

It was gone.

And it was my fault - I had not locked it. I’d misread the directions on the app the first time I used it, and thought that when you were using it the bike didn’t lock (which is unbelievably dumb when I take two seconds to think about it). I’ve been using the app for about 6 months and never had a problem (which is insanely lucky, because again, it is insanely dumb not to lock a very expensive bakfiets).

I went into full panic mode, and of course this is the moment when pushing the morning to the limit started to bite me in the ass. As I scrambled trying to figure out what to do, the Bug started freaking out, so I had to stop trying to figure out what to do and just scoop her up and hop on the tram. I called Dylan, who remained calm while I flipped, and told me he’d meet me at the tram stop to put the Bug on his bike to get her home and feed her so I could walk and talk with the bike company. He doesn’t say anything to make me feel bad about how this was completely avoidable and entirely my fault.

On the walk home, BAQME luckily traces the bike and advises me to get to it ASAP. I walk in the door to our house, grabbing my keys and explaining to Dylan what I’m about to do, when he unhesitatingly says “no way, I’ll go get it.” He takes my phone to track it in case the people who stole it go on the move and is out the door 30 seconds later. Less than 30 minutes later, he’s on the bike home.

I’m pretty sure I’ll get some flowers tomorrow. He’ll make me a pink cocktail tomorrow night, and give me a card that tells me how much he loves me. But today I was reminded that the something special of romance, the pink and red in the grey of winter, is the type of love that immediately springs into action, takes on something for your partner without question. I don’t need a love letter - he already crushed Valentine’s Day.