Liz Kearney’s Notebook
I salute the Valentine’s Day, married-with-kids heroes who fly the flag for romance
SO, how was Valentine’s Day for you?
Were you fêted with a dozen red roses, a bottle of the finest Champagne, and dinner for two in your favourite romantic restaurant?
Lucky you. My husband presented me with an extra-small packet of Love Hearts, which I thought was kind of a sweet gesture ’til he revealed he’d got them for free while paying for petrol in the local garage on our morning commute.
The first sweet read ‘Awesome’, which didn’t quite capture how I was feeling at that moment. And what did I get him in return? Um, does a lift to work count?
To be fair to both of us, Valentine’s Day has been fairly low down the pecking order for us since the arrival, on February 14 four years ago, of our first son.
Each year since then has been devoted, obviously, to celebrating him, rather than each other. And so while other couples have spent the past week booking restaurants and contacting florists, we’ve spent it scouring the toy shops of Dublin to assemble a collection of rare dinosaurs diverse enough to impress the paleo-obsessed birthday boy.
While we might have more excuse than most to dispense with Valentine’s traditions, it’s a common complaint among couples with young children that romance takes a back seat year-round as the day-to-day business of ensuring everyone is fed, dressed and present takes precedence over holding hands and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes.
Time is a luxury many of us don’t have enough of, and spending money on flowers and fancy dinners seems frivolous when the bills keep mounting.
And it’s not just the demands on time and money that chip away at your romantic edges.
Let’s face it, small children are a bit of a buzzkill.
Who’s in the mood for Champagne when the baby’s teething and the toddler’s having another tantrum? The truth is, like lots of other couples caught up in the happy but hectic maelstrom of family life and working parenthood, I don’t know if Hollywood-style romance is Dead Forever or simply On A Break.
I’d like to think the latter, but who can really say?
In my twenties I worked for several years as a waitress and we used to dread the annual spectacle of February 14 with its scores of dead-eyed older couples sitting in silence at their tables for two.
The contrast between the specially decorated place-settings, replete with flowers and love hearts, and the prosaic awkwardness of the couples eating their dinners was just too much.
Save us from a future as boring as that, we waitresses would giggle to one another as we picked over the latest dramas in our own infinitely more complex youthful romantic entanglements.
But now I wonder about those couples: Were they really dead-eyed, or just dead tired? Were they silent because they’d run out of things to say to one another, or were they simply enjoying a companionable moment of peace and quiet away from the kids?
Seen from my current perspective, they don’t look sad – they look heroic for flying the flag of romance, albeit a bit awkwardly, in the face of all the other crap life had presumably thrown at them by that point.
Put it this way: at least they weren’t eating Love Hearts at a petrol station.
I think next year myself and himself are going to have to raise our game.