Valentine's Day is the New New Years Day for Women Over 40
Head on over to Grown and Flown to visit my essay in its entirety: This Valentine's Day I Choose to Love Myself, and So Should You. Grown and Flown is an excellent resource (and book!) for parents with children in high school and college. Here is the start of the essay:
Sanitizing the upstairs bathroom after a recent bout with the flu and vacuuming the house after a New Year’s Eve so-called rager as we congratulated ourselves on the shocking feat of staying awake until midnight; this is what my New Year’s Day looked like. There was no new gym membership to cash in, no crisp, clean journal pages to fill, and no list of inspiring resolutions to follow. I’m in my 40s. I’m tired from all of the holiday hosting and school vacation entertaining. New Year’s Day was merely a blip on the radar for me.
I am busy in the way every mother in her 40s and 50s is. I multitask, I work, I parent kids whose new stages of emotional development exhaust me, and I try to ward off the physical feelings and signs of this new stage of my own life with occasional bursts of effort and distraction techniques. I really don’t have the capacity to care about maximizing the New Year’s holiday with bright and shiny resolutions.
As the days of 2020 fade into the pale grey category of “past events” on my phone’s calendar at an alarmingly fast rate, I realize I am suddenly waking up and recovering from the holiday crush. I can actually begin to think about what lies ahead for me this year. The kids are settled back in school and our family is finally enveloped in a sense of routine again. Self-care might be the last order of priority when it comes to caring for my family, but I now have the opportunity to begin to focus on it. Luckily, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner and coming up just in time for my chance to finally focus on me.
If I’m transparent about what Valentine’s Day typically means for myself and my girlfriends, it’s an excuse to gift my kids with something small and let them eat heart-shaped chocolate. It’s a day when we will attempt to get a babysitter. If one is available, we’ll have a really nice early dinner at a restaurant while we comment on how late it feels already even though it’s only 8:30 pm. If we can’t get a babysitter, our family will go out to dinner at one of our usual haunts, but we’ll call it a valentine celebration and possibly remember to clink glasses to acknowledge it. My husband and I will exchange sincerely sweet cards, but with the winter holidays and our wedding anniversary just behind us and our birthdays just ahead, we really don’t need a Hallmark holiday to squeeze in something special. All we really want is an hour together to catch up on our favorite show uninterrupted with a glass of wine.
So if my husband and I don’t really need Valentine’s Day and the kids are all set, then it means I am going to claim this holiday that’s all about love just for me, even if it’s simply by default. I’m going to make this holiday about self-love because now I finally have the chance to kick this year off with a holiday that doesn’t make demands of my time and energy.The concept of Galentine’s Day didn’t come to be without good reason. This is the time of year when women can finally look up from their to do lists, brush that last random Christmas tree needle into the trash, and think about introducing some intentional self-love into our daily routines.
