Why I Hate Valentine's Day

First of all let me say that one of my biggest pet peeves in the whole world is when people say "Valentimes."  Don't do it, people.  Don't do it.

Valentine's day has so many negative things attached to it for me that I purposefully adopted my dog on Valentine's day.  I needed a happy thought.  Now I get to celebrate Scout's "birthday" instead of thinking about the yuckies.

No, I didn't have too many lonely nights or a few too many broken hearts.  Perhaps the easiest reason that I hate V-Day is that we buried my grandmother on Valentine's Day.  Yeah.  The real reason I hate V-Day is actually worse than that.

I grew up in an abusive household.  My father would make a big stink out of V-Day.  He would do "special" things for my sister and I.  Send us each a pink rose to school, have balloons for us in the morning, make a special breakfast.  You would think this would be an awesome dad way to behave, right?  Well, he made V-Day as grandiose as he could for us in order to point out the things he wasn't doing for his wife... my mother.  He would do nothing for her and make sure we were all aware of it.  We would end up feeling guilty about the gifts we got, but if we expressed that we were ungrateful and spoiled and in big trouble.  So every year, we put up with the gifts we didn't want and swallowed the guilt and the pity.  Well, I did at least.  My father managed to convince my sister that my mother deserved it.

As I got older, I tried to get ballsier.  When I moved out, I would refuse delivery of any flowers or anything, but he found a way around that.  The worst V-Day came when I was in graduate school.  My father came to my apartment to hand deliver his annual ridiculous gift.  He then sat at my kitchen table and told me he had something to talk to me about.  He started sobbing, telling me a story about his time in Vietnam.  He told me he saved a man's life and watched him die.  He told me he had shrapnel in his knee and his butt from the attack.  He told me he earned a purple heart.

I never knew my father was in Vietnam.  In fact, I thought he was in high school at the time.  Our understanding was always that he got kicked out of boot camp and never actually joined the Marines.  My first thought when I heard this story?  I wondered how he got through metal detectors if he had shrapnel in his ass.  So I guess you could say that I knew right off the bat that it was a big lie.

The purple heart?  My brother has seen it, but I don't know how he managed to get his hands on one.  A private investigator heard our story and offered to pull his military history for us.  He really did get kicked out of boot camp.  There was no active duty for him, although he says it's a military cover up... and my sister believes him.

That V-Day was the day my life started to unravel.  We learned about 20 years of affairs, years of unemployment he somehow managed to fake, multiple mortgages my mother's signature was forged on... the list goes on.  That was when I started to realize that not everyone's mom gets yelled at constantly and that most girls aren't afraid of their fathers.  It's the day my father stopped being dad.

J tries really hard to make V-Day special and I could not be luckier to have him as a full time Valentine.  I can play along with the day now, but deep down, I'm still scarred by V-Day's past.  I feel like it's a day where people are primed to be disappointed and hurt.  I don't like days like that.