Hineini, A Valentine

Photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash

My guess is that most kids in grade 4 didn’t take the Valentine’s Day card exchange as seriously as I did. I counted them, checked out who gave what to whom, but mostly I thought about what they said. What did “love ya’” or “be mine” mean in the heart-shaped cards that we pressed from the cardboard page? I knew that I loved my parents, but what was the emotion that this exchange of greetings sought to promote?

Some children were clearly more concerned with love than others. I remember Carl W., not one of the cutest or brightest youngsters in our 3^rd grade class, addressing me at recess: “You want to be a chemist and I do too, so let’s plan on getting married, OK?” I barely knew Carl, but I appreciated his effort to think ahead. (My interest in chemistry involved mixing toothpaste and Rolaids! And for the record, I did not commit.)

In high school, tokens served as markers of love. Going steady meant the exchange of high school rings, for instance. Going to a fancy dance involved ordering corsages and boutonnieres and awkwardly attaching them to your date. My own high school version of polyamory involved collecting National Honor Society pins from the geeky guys who understood the humor of my effort and wearing them together on my sweater.

Soon thereafter, as a college student, I did come to understand a lover’s love, not what you felt for one’s parents, but the kind where someone sees you as a poem and untangles the poem of you and somehow puts it to music. It was the kind of love that both parties want to last forever and even then, you strongly suspect that it can’t.

The word I might use for that kind of love today is “hineini”—a religious term for “I am here, Here I am.” It is the word assigned to Moses when he confronts the burning bush and offers his all-in commitment and devotion, but it is also a term that suggests being fully seen and understood. Moses could be counted on. God could be counted on.

Twenty years later, as a not so young mother, I remember my 7 or 8 year old son telling me that a slightly older boy wanted him to pull down his pants. I called the kid’s mother and then spoke to the kid directly. Then we three, my son, my 4 or 5 year old daughter and I sat together on the couch to talk. I asked my little girl what she might do if someone asked her to do something that she didn’t want to do.

“I’d tell my mommy,” she easily replied.

Hineini. The best Valentine’s gift of all times.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. The secretary at the physical therapist’s office asks me to vote on which staff member did the best job decorating their window. I look at the cut-out hearts from the Dollar store, accented with bits a crepe paper, ribbon and bubble letters spelling out the word “love.”

I head for home, happily confident that my husband and I will not celebrate Valentine’s Day. We have enough stuff and neither of us are great at finding adequate tokens of love. What we are good at— what we do extremely well in fact—is that we can count on one another. We count on one another to share values, to show up on time, to say yes. We can be counted on to live in harmony, to be kind and reliable. I am grateful that we still do this together. Hineini.

PS. Apologies to folks who understand the religious meaning of Hineini

PPS. Apologies to my husband who says I may, in fact, get a Valentine’s gift.