The greatest Valentine’s gift I ever received didn’t come wrapped in red cellophane or tied with a satin bow. It arrived in a hospital room, in the quiet space between heartbeats, warm and breathing and impossibly small in my arms.
My son was meant to be born on Valentine’s Day, but he chose the day after, and somehow that felt right—as if love itself stepped just beyond the performance of the holiday and showed up in its truest form when the noise had softened, and the crowds had thinned. Valentine’s Day was never really about romance for me. It was about belonging. About being chosen. About the dangerous, tender hope of opening your hands and finding something waiting there.
Long ago, when I was a child, Valentine’s Day at school was not a single afternoon but a small ceremony that began days before. We were handed shoeboxes, glue sticks, and scraps of bright paper, and we carved small doors into cardboard and built tiny temples of anticipation.
I went to Erbsville Public School, a modest little building that still stands on the outskirts of a town that has long since grown around it. It is a community centre now, but the walls haven’t forgotten. They still hold the echoes of small footsteps, nervous laughter, and secrets children never learn how to name. When I pass it on my way to the market, something in me still tightens, as though that place is waiting for me to return and gather the pieces of myself I left scattered in its hallways.
I remember one particular Valentine’s Day. The classroom filled with anticipation, and on command, we launched out of our seats and into the room, arms full of paper hearts and crookedly written names, everyone laughing too loudly. Children darting from box to box while paper hearts fluttered through the air, names written with marker, the room alive with motion and noise and hope.
Most of the boys’ boxes were simple; most of the girls’ boxes were bursting with colour, glitter, and careful decoration. Mine was one of them. I had made it beautiful because I believed, quietly and fiercely, that beauty might call love toward it. When the commotion finally settled, and we were all back in our seats, I opened my box.
The room didn’t go silent. No one noticed. But something inside me did. At the bottom of a space I had prepared for more, only two small pieces of paper waited. Even at six years old, I understood what that meant in a room that held many, and without needing to read the names, I knew who they were from—one kindness offered out of duty, and one from the only child who stood close enough to call me a friend.
That was the first time disappointment found a home in my body. It settled into my stomach like a stone and taught me, before I had words for it, what rejection feels like. I was a different child, a strange one, speaking about things no one else noticed, feeling too deeply, seeing too much and saying it out loud. I carried entire worlds inside me and did not yet know how to make them smaller so they could fit into classrooms and lunch tables and playground rules. That day, I learned a dangerous lesson—that being myself might mean being alone—and so from that day forward I began, slowly, to edit who I was, to soften the edges, to translate my wonder into something more palatable, to hide the parts of me that made others uncomfortable. And yet, those same parts would later become the very ones that saved me: the creator, the one who sees what others overlook, the one who builds new worlds when the old ones refuse to make room.
Years later, sitting at a kitchen table with my own children, writing names on neat classroom lists, I felt a quiet gratitude rise in me, knowing no child would open an empty box, no small heart would have to learn that lesson so early. I carried that memory with me, the weight of it still familiar in my body, and maybe that is why Valentine’s Day became something bigger in our house—loud and joyful and ritual-filled, just a little over the top—not only for them, but for the child I once was, the one who learned the shape of loneliness before she learned how to name it. Becoming a mother changed my understanding of love in ways I could never have predicted, and my son—my almost-Valentine—became a quiet reminder that love does not always arrive in the costumes we expect it to wear, that it shows up when it is ready, in forms that undo us, in ways that make the old wounds feel survivable.
So if today finds you alone, or between chapters, or quietly aching in a world that seems obsessed with pairs and performances—let this be your permission slip:
Valentine’s Day does not belong to couples.
It belongs to hearts.
Make yourself a Valentine.
Write yourself the words you always waited to receive.
Buy yourself the flowers.
Take yourself out to dinner.
Light the candle.
Hold your own hands.
You are not too strange. You are not too much. You were never meant to fit inside the small boxes they gave you.
You were always meant to be the one who builds them—and then breaks them open. <3