How was your Valentine’s Day?

Sometime around the end of January, I ordered a necklace for myself. It arrived in a heart-shaped box.

The necklace itself and the cost are trivial to my tale so I will spare you the details of the $10 stone around my neck or the color the chain turned my neck after a few short days.

Instead, I will tell you the many, many reasons why I care nothing at all about Valentine’s Day … if only. In fact, in this very cheesy, very corny candy and flowers kinda way, I believe in the power of Hallmark and all that four-letter L-word has to offer.

Yes, I believe in the box of Russell Stover chocolates and the one dozen red roses lightly laced with baby’s breath. I believe in the Nicholas Sparks (or John Green) novels. I believe in adoration professing and ridiculous cards and soulful daytime television-worthy gazes.

Pick your poison or your “Love Potion Number Nine,” it’s all in the game of this crazy little thing called love, my friend.

None of this matters, of course, because my husband has never been much of a gift-giver, and long ago he disavowed all allegiance to or acquisition of anything even remotely romantic, heart-shaped or stuffed (like a bear), reserving his soulful gazes instead for the thing he loves most … his arugula.

So I tell myself these things aren’t important, which they’re not really in the grand scheme of almost 14 years together and that sitting on the couch with something called Vin Glogg, A Winter Wine while pining for Chris Pine in Into the Woods is the next best thing to some candlelit nonsense that was never going to happen anyway, or better yet would likely be interrupted by someone puking or lodging a Cheerio up their nose. (Side Note: I always wanted to play ‘The Baker’s Wife,’ and in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that she really struggles with the whole concept of and/or and plummets aimlessly from a high cliff, it’s still arguably the best part in the show.)

But since no princes seem intent on seducing me, and sadly, I’ll never sing like Emily Blunt, this year all I wanted for Valentine’s Day (in no particular order) was:

  • A lifetime supply of mulled wine (and Chris Pine to go with it)
  • A small, handy tool to extract cereal and other dime-sized food particles from nasal passages
  • For my couch for one day to stop playing exorcist with my laundry
  • That I could somehow, maybe, unread that article about an alligator swimming in a river in the tri-state area because I think after a while, crocodile of mulling that one over, I may never freshwater swim again
  • Intellectual property rights to a short at-home video my younger daughter co-produced of me doing something I can only describe as the turkey trot
  • That the cat might one day truly come to terms with the fact that no matter how cute she looks sitting in Junior’s highchair that I draw the line at feeding her there
  • A better approval rating with my in-laws
  • For my younger daughter’s noise-canceling headphones to one day magically just disappear themselves
  • A bra that postdates 1999
  • Boobs that don’t
  • Some sort of padded room for my son to not smack his head for the four millionth time in a row
  • That either of my daughters will actually respond to a text or pick up the phone when I call them … you’d have an easier time contacting Edward Snowden
  • Some sort of seven minutes in heaven portal with a three push button remote that would wondrously whoosh me away from the witching hour and instead to…
  1. Chris Pines in the pines
  2. Milo in Milan?
  3. Not sure his real-life name but the actor who plays Gabriel in “Emily in Paris” anywhere Parisian, (please include the accent if he doesn’t actually have one)
  • A mute feature (if you have a significant other and/or children, this requires no further explanation)
  • A no-compete clause with that arugula
  • For bedtime to not suddenly involve the insistence of a pool noodle, battery-operated Christmas lights and something called a Hover Ball
  • My $10 back
  • To realize that often, it’s hard to see the woods (or an alligator) through the trees but after 14 years, dislodging a snotty Cheerio and accidentally feeding it to the cat from a high-back Graco is truly as romantic as a candlelit dinner … almost.

Columnist Lesley Kirschner grew up quiet, in the woods, and devoid of siblings so her hobbies quickly became reading, writing, and talking to inanimate objects. She also spent a considerable amount of time doing voice-overs for her dolls and watching too much daytime television–channel 3, sometimes channel 8, if the weather was good and the antenna wasn’t acting up. She was in attendance at school, graduated from a very much not notable college not worth mentioning, and was transplanted to Wilton with her husband, Ambler Farm‘s Farmer Jonathan and their (baby makes) three children almost a decade ago. Although she never quite found her calling in life, other than perhaps the doll voice-overs, which in hindsight were eerily convincing, she’s happy to try her hand at writing and is thankful for the support and community she found on Facebook’s Buy Nothing Wilton. Lesley realizes while this is all very exciting, she’s not winning a Pulitzer so she’ll wrap it up and be quiet. She’s had a lot of practice.