WHERE IS MY VALENTINE?

Never has a woman been more at the mercy of men than on Valentine Day.

It is February the fourteenth. I head to the hospital, for me it is like any other day. As I enter the nurses station there is a Mylar balloon with a heart on the desk of the clerk, chocolate in a heart shaped box for one of the nurses. Not everyone has received a gift commemorating this mysterious holiday.

The patients have fake lollipops; tinsel hearts from social workers while their parents remain noticeably absent. There is a child with a broken leg from sexual abuse in one of the rooms; he has a small, tacky tinsel heart that the social worker brought. When I asked why she did so, she said “something for him so he should not feel left out.

”I wonder….. would he be feeling left out because his mother’s boyfriend abused him, or that he is alone in the Hospital room. Or would he be feeling left out because the one person in this world whose only job is to love him is absent?

I make my rounds from room to room discovering more and more tinsel plastic hearts, and I wonder if this is the only happiness these children can have and what it means to them?

Where are the relatives, the family the neighbors, the hot meals, the hugs, the therapy of touch, the talk and the laughter and most of all inclusion onto a larger extended family?

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I recall one of the rights of a muslim on another is to visit his or her brother or sister if they are sick, and suddenly in this lonely, abused child’s room with tinsel hearts, the wisdom of the Prophet’s (PBUH) teaching hits home.

Here in the antiseptic corridors of the Hospital Valentine is in full force. There is a young sweet student nurse who has been waiting for the “ ring” at Valentine. As it is still midday, hope flowers in her heart, “we are meeting for coffee after work, and maybe then…” she says coyly.

The large hearts hanging on the doors and windows are signs of love for some and rejection for others. It is difficult to say to them that love does not come in a plastic cutout, nor does lack of that cutout mean rejection; but I am too foreign to understand this or explain it to them. Even to me It had sounded so romantic in the TV sitcoms which I watched as a young resident, However it looks so pathetic in real life.

The heavy weight middle-aged nurse is joking; “ Next year I am going to send myself flowers” I stop…what is this? Peer pressure or a subtle message to the women about their worth. Thus if she gets flowers is she happy & worthy and the rest are not? The others are envious of her or does she have different levels to compare to.

For example if someone who got red full-bloodied roses and chocolate, or the one who got Godiva? The envy, the gloating and the rejection are palpable on this day of Valentine.

Valentine is inculcated at age six and seven when little children write valentine cards to the opposite sex in the whole class, I take that back, the mothers write the cards, and I was one of them, I was told this was an American tradition. When my son came back from school, I asked him if he had given the cards to his classmates, he said he gave them to the teacher. I asked him if he got any, he said the teacher put them in his bag.

Days later I removed them from his bag, they were unopened and unread. I opened them and read laborious writings, ‘Tariq I love you’, ‘Tariq be my Valentine’ etc etc etc. Had the girls left their card unopened, did they have that remarkable lack of interest in Valentine cards as my seven-year-old son?

What was I drilling into my son’s head by writing all these cards for him?; Were all these girls his valentines? And what did that really mean at age seven? Was this vicarious living on part of the adults and perhaps a sign of diehard commercialism of hallmark and ftd?

How about me ? I have neither flowers nor chocolate, should I be feeling sorry for myself? Does that mean I am unloved? On the wings of that thought come images of being welcomed in to loving homes, hugged, conversations brimming with laughter, the warmth of love soaking into me as I spend hours sipping tea talking about life & philosophy with my family and friends.

I look at their hands and none of them come bearing Valentine flowers.