Dear friends,
This Valentine’s Day taught me a simple but deeply meaningful lesson, one I’d like to share with you.
It was time for breakfast, and my partner and I were waiting for our boy, Alexy, at the kitchen table. He was taking more time than usual to get ready, and when he arrived, he came with two Valentine’s Day cards, one for me and one for Elly, my partner. The cards were in DIY envelopes on which Alexy had drawn heart-shaped portraits of Elly and me. Inside, he expressed his love and gratitude for our being there for him. (Alexy’s cards were all the more moving for his brazen disregard of Bulgarian grammar and punctuation; modernist prose at its finest!) Elly teared up, and the three of us embraced… But I was filled with a mixture of feelings that was altogether not too pleasant.
Alexy’s gift moved me deeply, moved me to tears in fact, but in spite of that—or rather, because of that—a gnawing sense of guilt arose within me. First, I thought, I had not gotten any present for him, and second, the beautiful necklace I had bought for Elly seemed like such an inadequate, impersonal gift next to what Alexy had made for us. So, there I made my first mistake; clinging to my perceived “performance” on the occasion, I made myself unable to receive Alexy’s gift, unable to allow myself the love he was giving me freely. I made my second mistake, too: I determined to “fix” the situation by buying more gifts.
