Juggling For My Love
I taught myself to juggle back in the late 90s, before YouTube. I used a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz, as I recall. I’m not talking juggling worthy of Cirque du Soleil or even standing in a subway station with my hat turned over. I’m talking baby juggling, but juggling nonetheless. I remember the feeling of victory the first time I had three balls in the air and felt that shift required in hand-eye coordination. I’d just practice and practice with some soft balls that wouldn’t damage furniture or break windows, never with irregular shaped objects. I would juggle oranges at work, not confident enough for eggs, and it was cool to once in awhile to just be practicing and have someone I worked with look back and say “did I just see that?” You don’t see someone juggling every day, after all.
It was really fun to learn. So much fun, that I got it in my head I would demonstrate my new found prowess as a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. No card, no flowers, nothing traditional that I remember. I just stood in the kitchen and said look what I did for you. I started to juggle whatever I was using at the time. So she watched me, and then said “In all honesty, I need more than that.” She wasn’t all that impressed with my Valentine’s offering. Afterwards, through the years, I did go back to roses, cards, cooking nice meals, the usual and predictable offerings. Like so many men, I was not on the same page as she about this.
Fast forward a few decades, a few decades of learning and marriage, to the present. My wife, a relationship coach, has now effectively eliminated the stress of Valentine’s Day from me. She encourages women to take Valentine’s Day away from their men, along with all the accompanying expectations of how it should look.
Her notion is this: Valentine’s Day misery is all due to Hallmark, followed closely by FTD & Kay Jewelers. She saw a print ad one time that showed a woman with a boxing glove on and a man sporting a black eye, because he didn’t get the right gift. It was a Kay Jewelers ad. The majority of men would love nothing more than to have the “holiday” disappear forever and not because men aren’t generous and don’t want to make their women happy. “They love to be generous,” she notes, “and make us happy. On their terms, not Hallmark’s. To have this on-demand stuff, just to stay out of trouble, is not as inspiring for men.”
All of that is well and good, along with the usual spectrum of ideas about what kind of holiday Valentine’s really is and how Valentine’s Day ought to be every day in a relationship, that sort of stuff. However, since this is a blog about gratitude, how does this story relate?
Well, I’m grateful for a wife who could be this insightful and such an advocate for men and for the arc through which we’ve journeyed over these many years of marriage. It’s also a great memory, a funny one, truth be told, and it’s fun to remember when I learned to juggle. I genuinely feel gratitude for those little stories that add richness to life.
But perhaps the deeper message here is that I decided to make today’s post about this for the same reason I’ve made every other post. I get up and I look around and, whatever I see, I write about it and ask myself some version of the question–“What in this is there to be grateful for?” Same formula, same question.
I got in touch with one of my deepest desires for this work twice per week. I hope some reader stops and looks around and, whatever they see, however homely it is, however domestic, however commonplace, they just stop for a minute and ask what there is to be grateful for. I saw scribbled on a wall “Your story begins at home.” I think gratitude does as well.
