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When Your Hallmark Moment Goes Wrong
A Valentine's Day Story for Real Life
By Laura Sackett
It was Valentine's Day and my husband was deploying to Iraq soon, so I wanted it to be special.
I had stopped at the grocery store so I could fix a nice dinner. I only needed a few things, but I should have known better.
After a diaper blowout, a trek across the store to retrieve a dropped toy, and an endless wait at the checkout line, I finally escaped with a cart full of groceries and two wailing kids.
By the time I buckled my boys into their carseats and unloaded the bags from the cart, I was vowing I would never go to the grocery store again. Right about then, a terrible jolt shook our car. Someone had backed into my minivan.
We spent another hour in the parking lot before finally making it home. I put the baby in his crib, set my 3-year-old in his room with some books, and shoved a frozen dinner in the oven.
When my husband walked in the door, he found his Valentine sitting numbly at the kitchen table, surrounded by bags of groceries and fed up with life. I remember staring at him and thinking, "This wasn't how it was supposed to be!"
For all I knew, this could be our last Valentine's Day together. I had wanted it to be special, but reality was messing with my expectations, big time.
I walked down the hall to check on our boys and discovered they'd both fallen sound asleep. The oven timer beeped. Returning to the kitchen, I had an idea. Minutes later, my husband and I sat down to a candlelight dinner, groceries heaped at our feet.
We ate overcooked lasagna from a box. We looked into each other's eyes and talked. We feasted on being together. We took life, our life, as it was...and we made the best of it. Was it a Hallmark moment? Not even close. But it was something better: it was real.
He came home safe from that deployment, and I am forever grateful. Still, we haven't lived a fairy tale. Over the last few years, my heart has taken hits far worse than what happened to my minivan that day. But I'm learning not to measure my marriage by how well it lives up to my expectations.
Instead, I'm freeing it to be what it is: two broken people living in a broken world, called to be faithful to God and each other -- in real life, with all its highs and lows. It's not always what I'd choose, but it's growing the kind of love that will endure long after Valentine's Day has come and gone.
And that's better than any Hallmark moment.
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