Roses Are Red

In each of our lives, we have turning points. Those moments when something happens, or maybe doesn’t happen, where the direction and view we have of our lives shifts and finds a new focus, for better or for worse. One of those moments happened for me on a Valentine’s Day about 10 years ago when I received a dozen long stemmed red roses…that were not meant for me.

When you are single and have no significant other in your life, Valentine’s Day is one of the WORST holidays around. It seems to be a day whose sole purpose to exist is to remind those who have no one of their own to love just how much they are missing out on. You see ads and commercials and movies all around you with happy couples, holding hands and just being oh so much in love with each other. That’s all great and warm and fuzzy when you have someone to share those special moments with, but when you don’t…..it sucks! I spent many a lonely Valentine’s Day just that way and what just made it all that much worse for me was that I was a hopeless romantic. I bought into all that romantic stuff lock, stock and barrel. I ate it up as if it were chocolate covered cherries dipped in ice cream and covered in sprinkles and cream. My already vivid and overactive imagination would often wonder if there was someone else out there somewhere who felt as I did and that somehow, someway, we would find each other and live happily ever after. Yep…..I think I watched Sleepless in Seattle just one time too many.  

This particular Valentine’s Day that I am talking about right now started out just like every other one for me…..boyfriendless. My parents would always get me a card and a box of candy for Valentine’s Day and I always appreciated it greatly, but that was about all I could ever expect to receive for the day. But on this Valentine’s Day, something unexpected happened. About 3 in the afternoon our doorbell rang. When I answered the door, it was a delivery boy holding a large box filled with a dozen long stemmed red roses! For one brief second…just one brief moment…I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that maybe….just MAYBE…somehow these roses were meant for me. Perhaps somehow my one true love from some far off kingdom had found me, after looking for me for so many years, and discovered that perhaps he should have thought to first look for me in Brooklyn as opposed to Camelot or Sherwood Forest as he MUST have been doing all of the years up until then (hey, even Prince Charming can goof sometimes). But once my moment of fantastical bliss was complete, reality took over and I knew those roses were not intended for me. They were for my next door neighbor who wasn’t home at the time. The delivery boy asked me if I would mind accepting them for her. When I brought them inside, I just looked at them, admiring their beauty. I held the box in my arms as if I was a newly crowned Miss America. I closed my eyes and breathed in their sweet perfume. For those few moments, I had experienced what so many others would get to experience on their Valentine’s Day. I had received a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day. But I didn’t indulge in my fantasy for too long and allowed reality to enter my mind and swiftly clear away the traces of the bliss that remained. I closed the box, put them down, and started to cry. That single moment felt like a massive culmination of all of the sadness, loneliness and hopelessness that I had felt every year on this day. That had to rate as one of the lowest points of my life. It was that moment that made me realize that I needed to do SOMETHING to change things for myself…..which took some time and hard work for me to do.

A year or so later, I met the man who would become my boyfriend for close to five years (we broke up 4 years ago). The first time we met, he brought me a bouquet of flowers…which included a single red rose. It was the first rose that was ever given to me…..and I still have it. I would have loved to kept it suspended in a bell jar forever like in the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast” but instead I dried it and have it safely tucked away in a small Rubbermaid container (not quite the bell jar, but it was the best I could do).  Money was tight for us in the beginning but one year on Christmas Eve after he had gotten a good paying job, he brought me home a dozen long stemmed red roses…..and this time they were really for ME and were mine to keep. I am fortunate to have received roses from him after that as well as from my boyfriend now, too, and I save the petals from all of them in a pretty glass jar. I waited a very VERY long time to receive roses from someone special….so I don’t take ANY of them for granted.

With that, I would like to simply say this…..

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

With some hope and patience,

Some wishes REALLY CAN come true!

A Letter to Myself at Sixteen

Dear Me at 16,

I’m glad I have this chance to write this for you because there is so much I want to tell you about your future. I remember how much you wondered about your future when you were a teenager. I remember how lonely and hopeless you felt because you thought things would never change for you. I remember how much you hated what you saw in the mirror everyday. I remember how although you always held on to the hope that one day things would be different for yourself, you also resided yourself to the fact that things would always be as they were for you then and you just tried your best to accept it. Well I have something to tell you……you were wrong.

I know right now at 16 your fondest wish is to be beautiful and to have it that for once….just ONCE….it would be YOU to turn the guys heads and not just the girls around you. I know you feel like you’re nothing right now, like your invisible to the world, but guess what….you’re really not. You make yourself invisible because you don’t want the world to see you as you see yourself. But some people care and will care more than you realize, if you just give them the chance to get close to you. Not everyone around you is going to hurt you. Okay, some will, I wont lie to you about that. But for every thoughtless jerk in the world, there is someone who has a warm, kind and compassionate heart who will sincerely care about you. Be brave and put yourself out there once in awhile. Yes, you will get hurt sometimes doing this, but what you get in return from the good people will make it all worth it. But in those times when you do get hurt by life and from some of the people in it, try to remember that all of those hurts and all of that pain in the end will help you to become the person you are meant to be. You will remember those times and how you felt and it will help you to empathize with others who are experiencing pain and make you want to try and help them in any way that you can ….just as you wished someone would have done for you. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger and you WILL be stronger from it all and have a more loving heart because of it, too.  Surprisingly, it will all be worth it in the end.

And believe it or not yes…one day…you will look into the mirror and like what you see. What, you don’t believe me? Now why would I lie to you? I know it’s hard but you just gotta trust me on this one. One day, as if your fairy godmother waved her magic wand over you, you will bloom. Some rosebuds need more time than others, more love and care, to be brave enough to allow the beauty that they hold deep inside of their petals to be seen by the whole world., but just be patient with yourself. One day you will realize that it hurts more to remain hidden inside of your rosebud than it will be to risk it all and allow yourself to bloom. And once you do….words wont be able to describe how you feel! You will take every compliment you receive and embrace it as if it was one of the greatest treasures on Earth because you and I both know to you….it is. Yes, sometimes what seems to be impossible actually is possible. So have faith, don’t ever give up hope and whatever you do, don’t listen to or pay any mind to the naysayers of this world who put you down and who don’t appreciate all the love and gifts you have to offer. In the end they don’t matter, so don’t give them the power to make you feel bad about yourself in anyway.

Now after knowing what your future has in store for you, I want you to remember something very important. For as much as you want to be pretty…in the end….it’s NOT what is important. As you wait for your time in the sun, you need to continue to work on what is TRULY important. Keep working hard in school and studying because developing your mind and intelligence is important and so is developing your personality. You see, everyone’s looks fade over time and in the end if that is all you depended on and all you had to offer the world, you will be sadly left. What beauty lies on the inside is TRULY what’s most important. Also, always keep your heart and mind open. Offer kindness to people for no other reason than because it’s the right thing to do and it’s what you would want others to do for you. Always put out into this world what you would hope to get back from it and you will never go wrong. In the end…..just be the kind of person you would want to know and be around yourself.

Beyond this, you don’t need to know right now. A peek into the future is fine but to stare at it is impolite. Be happy with what I have told you and just remember to hang in there….it all does get better.

Love,

Me at 38…..yeah, I can’t believe it either!  {{SIGH}}