Dear Cupid...

I am in love with holidays. 

I feel like with a holiday,

the world is just giving us all an excuse to celebrate something.

To be extra happy. 

And I love an excuse to be silly, and over-the-top, and happy.

So naturally I love love the holiday of love.

But I didn't always.

In high school,

for the most part,

I was the girl who was nice to everyone,

good at sports, had a really awesome group of friends,

most people knew me, not because I was popular,

but because I did the announcements (cough cough nerd alert cough cough).

My junior year, I ended up dating a stud football player,

so my love life started looking up then,

but before that . . .

I just didn't quite have it.

It could have been the perm or the obnoxious bangs or the mouth full of braces,

I mean, really, the list could go on forever . . .

but as far as teenage girl catches were concerned,

I wasn't on the list.

So like most junior high and high school girls,

Valentine's Day sucked.

No one delivered a fifty-cent carnation to my homeroom class,

and I didn't get jewelry (that would later turn my skin green) or candy,

or some embarrassing bouquet of "I Love You" balloons.

I can only imagine that the Tiny Human will go through this phase of Valentine's Day disdain someday too . . .

because when you're young,

and your body is raging with hormones and the only thing your brain can focus on is some lusty locker encounter with a pimply-faced twerp of a boy,

Valentine's Day is only about romantic love.

Thank goodness I don't see it that way anymore . . .

To this day,

the most fulfilling love I have ever experienced hasn't been from a romantic partner.

Sometimes that makes me sad,

but it's not an overwhelming sad and it's so fleeting.

Because I am so genuinely grateful for the love stories I do have in my life,

and that I have experienced during my lifetime.

Without question,

the truest and greatest love of my life is my daughter.

She will always be the best thing my heart has ever known.

I've been loved 

and gotten to love back some amazing people . . .

my parents,

my birth mom,

some amazing friends . . .

and LakeGirl,

who will until the end of the world be my weirdo soul mate.

And then there are the people who I encounter, even briefly,

during the course of a day,

that emanate love.

A stranger who holds a door . . .

My Starbucks barista who greets me by name and makes my heart happy . . .

the person in line at Target who lets us cut in front because he can see the meltdown about to explode from the Tiny Human's little body . . .

Little reminders of love make me fall in love with being alive every day.

So if Cupid's listening,

I just wanted him to know you kinda got this whole thing wrong.

Valentine's Day is about so, so much more than two people falling in love.

It's about all of the beautiful reasons the world offers us to fall in love with ourselves,

with our friends, our family, with the world around us . . .

it's about all of the little things that should make us fall in love with life every single day.

Being alive.

Plain and simple.

That's the best love story there is.