The Politics of Valentines

E is resisting the dominant valentine paradigm. She made a valentine for A, her best friend from her sitter’s. Then she made a valentine for K, her best friend at preschool. Then she got tired, which was fine, because I savvily started the valentine-making process a week early to avoid the last-minute rush of parentally-pressured shoddily-constructed valentines (yes, we make them, though sometimes I wonder why, since every other kid we have ever encountered in our sitter/school valentine history buys packs of cartoon character valentines that you just need to write your name on--except for M’s best friend L who also makes, which in a nutshell explains why they are best friends--but I feel that to buy cartoon character valentines is to succumb fully to the commodification of all aspects of civilization and I just can’t do it) (besides, I actually like making valentines, which, given my ongoing non-project-mama status, makes valentine-making a rare opportunity for happy mom-kid project interaction) (and, despite the hegemony of commodity capitalism, the other kids love getting M and E’s homemade valentines).

But back to E: when she said she was done making valentines, I said that was fine and she could make the rest later, to which she replied that she only needed to make one for R, another preschool friend, and one for her teachers, and then she’d be done. To which I replied, “No, you need to make one for every kid in your class.” To which she replied, “No, I’m only making them for my friends.”

And there we have E embodying the institutional valentine dilemma. Her instincts are right on: she knows who she likes and she knows that valentines are a way to tell people you like them, ergo she should be making valentines for the people she likes. If I were a textbook conservative, I’d support her freedom to express her individual desires and the hell with the teacher’s socialist demands. If I were a textbook liberal, I’d explain to her that it’s not fair when some kids get valentines and others don’t, and it hurts people’s feelings when they don’t get valentines, and that’s why the teachers ask the kids to bring a valentine for everyone in the class. In fact, since I basically am a textbook liberal, I tried this, but it didn’t work. So now I’m just a conflicted mom who wants to affirm my kid’s autonomy and doesn’t want to make trouble for the teacher, and is really hoping that if we wait a few days the issue will just go away.

[Then there’s M who wholeheartedly embraces valentine-making of any kind and likes everyone in her class anyway. But there are a lot more third graders than there are preschoolers, so I hit on the ingenious solution of a valentine assembly line. M liked this idea because her class used an assembly line to make the holiday cards they sold to raise money for Habitat for Humanity--let’s hear it for public schools teaching our kids to be cogs in the wheel of, you guessed it, a kinder, gentler commodity capitalism. So first I traced 20 hearts on a sheet of white posterboard, then she stamped a purple heart in the upper-left-hand corner of each heart, then I put two small heart stickers on each side, then she put a big heart sticker on the bottom, etc. I cut out the hearts, and voila, 20 valentines in 15 minutes and now all she needs to do is write the names. Almost as easy as buying and about ten times as expensive!]