A Valentine for Harlequin's Anniversary
Page 5
That year was all there in the photos. The non-posed shots where someone blinked. Or cried. Or got too antsy before the picture was snapped. I saw the smiles that hadn’t been coaxed, the happiness that couldn’t be hidden, and the precious ordinary moments we shared as a family.
In that box, there was a picture of my daughter’s first birthday. No, this wasn’t a shot of the birthday cake and presents; those had gone into one of the lost albums. In this picture, she was walking out to greet her dad who was coming home early from work so we could celebrate her birthday. There was another shot of my sons wrestling on the floor-a rare moment indeed since my autistic son rarely joined the roughhouse play. Yet, there he was smiling-another rarity.
I believed in love before I found the photos. I believe in love every time I kiss my husband or hug my kids. But in those images from two decades ago, I saw the love. My daughter’s smile. My sons’ playfulness. My exhausted husband who still found the energy to listen to every little detail that the kids wanted to tell him about their day, and then he would listen to me. All of that’s captured in the images.
The love had always been there, of course, but I’d never felt it that strong and had never seen it as clearly as I did in those imperfect pictures. Of course, I boo-hoo’ed all over the place, and my kids, who are now in college, couldn’t understand my reaction and mumbled something about mom being hormonal. That’s okay. One day, they’ll get it. One day, they’ll see photos of their own families and will understand.
So, that’s why I believe in love.
Because I found some old photos stuffed in a Payless shoe box, and they reminded me that love isn’t a place, or the stuff, or even the lack of stuff. It’s not just the good, nor the bad. It’s the people. It’s my family.
—Delores Fossen
#33
I believe in love because I know love. And the love I’m going to talk about today is the love of my new baby daughter, Bridget. I’d love to share with you some moments with her that assure me love is truly alive and well in the world.
My favourite photograph of us together is in the hospital, waking up as the sun rose on her third day. Still in my PJs, with bed hair and no make-up, I am holding her close, her head tucked beneath my chin. I look at this photo even now and it brings tears to my eyes because I can still remember the swell of unconditional love that surged through me as that trusting little critter lay against me, believing I could do no wrong by her.
In the early days I was getting up to feed her three times a night. Doesn’t sound like something you’d inflict upon someone you love right? Well the one thing that amazed me was that even though every time I awoke to that new baby cry, knowing I would be parted from my beloved bed, my beloved pillow and my beloved sleep for the next hour, the second I looked down into that sweet little face in the cradle I just fell in love all over again.
I feel most loved when my daughter smiles at me in the mirror, hiding her face against my chest as though she’s overcome with happiness. When she’s in anyone else’s arms she watches me as I walk around a room. And when she stares unblinking into my eyes when I sing The Rainbow Connection.
She’s now a little over four months old and quite truly the love of my life.
The books I have received most reader mail about-A FATHER IN THE MAKING and MILLIONAIRE TO THE RESCUE-are those in which my heroines have had young children. This bond between mother and child has obviously touched more readers to write and tell me than any other, and I wonder if that’s because the bar on what kind of man a woman will allow into her life is raised when the happiness of her children is at stake.
Now that I’m a new mum, I can’t wait to see how it colours my writing. I wonder how writing about families will change now that I am in a position to really know how family dynamics work. What truly heavenly heroes await—for surely a young mum deserves one who cooks, cleans, changes nappies! Lucky for me I have one of those all for myself so I don’t have to look far for research purposes.
As to the romance of being permanently covered in baby spew, of walking around all the time with a cloth nappy over one’s shoulder without realising it, of having permanent bags under ones eyes and at best four hours of sleep in one block at night, and taking a half hour longer to get in and out of the car than a woman without kids, well we write romantic fantasy right;)?
—Ally Blake
www.allyblake.com
#34
I believe in love because what else is there? If not love, then what would fill my heart and colour my life and inform my choices?
I believe in love in its many shapes and textures. I believe in the lightning bolt of instant attraction. I believe in all the clichés: the knee-melting, stomach-tightening, heart-skipping eye meet across a crowded room. The inability to look away, to breathe, to speak, to reason. I believe in the heart knowing that this is The One.
I believe because that’s how it was for me, twenty-nine years ago.
I believe in love beyond that first flush of infatuation. I believe in the power of laughter and of quiet conversation, in shared newspapers on a Sunday morning, in walking hand in hand, and in unexpected kisses…just because. I believe in companionable silences and in heated debates and in making up even when sorry is the hardest word to voice.
I believe in the instant bond of maternal love and in the husband with the goofy grin and misty eyes standing by my bedside and holding my hand. If I didn’t believe in his love, then we wouldn’t have made it through my week in the maternity ward and his decision to use his time alone at home to clear out some of “the junk” in the spare room. I managed to replace most of the books he “cleared out.” Our love survived.
It survived and it strengthened…without that strength it would not have survived. My sanity would not have. He held my hand again as we learned that our second son had serious “developmental delays”, as I angsted over why, what, how. Through year after year of therapy sessions and specialists’ surgeries and diagnostic probing until I screamed enough. In the quiet aftermath we got our diagnosis. It didn’t change a thing. We have a son who cannot say the words but who shows us love in its purest form, in a hug, in a look, every day.
I believe in the blurred multi-textured canvas that is familial love. You know the kind: where a parent or a sibling drive you to the brink of despair and yet you don’t give up because beneath all the angst there is love.
I believe in the love that I write about, because beyond the trappings of a fantasy world, beneath the patina of wealth and privilege and fabulous good looks, these are real people with the same needs and fears as you and me. I believe in their first heart-stopping meeting, in the consuming heat of desire, in the powerful emotions stirred by a newborn baby or by a bride’s marriage vows.
I believe their love will survive and that it will strengthen through every trial they face in the years ahead. I believe because I feel their love and know its power.
—Bronwyn Jameson
www.bronwynjameson.com
#35
Why do I believe in love? I believe in love because love is all around and seeing is believing. You don’t have to go far to find it, just down the street to your local park. Two elderly people walking to their favourite seat, still hand in hand after fifty years together; a pair of teenagers, eyes locked, suddenly silent, realising for the first time that there is something outside themselves they will never understand and will never want to let go; a tired mother smiling as she leans on her husband’s shoulder while they watch their children playing on the swings.
And feeling is believing too. How do you know you’re in love? It can creep up on you so subtly that you don’t realise for a long time why there is that ache inside and that glow around everything. Or it can knock your feet right out from under you and you stare, wide eyed, from the emotional equivalent of finding yourself flat on the pavement-and there it is.
And time doesn’t seem to dim it. It changes it, matures it, deepens it. Perhaps that deepening
is another of the reasons I believe in it. Or perhaps it is as simple and as complex as that hit I feel deep inside when I see the man I love unexpectedly. Today is our thirty seventh wedding anniversary, and even after all that time it still happens, that realisation that he is the other half the circle that is us. Why do I love him? Why does he love me?
You can blame it all on our genes, on pheromones or on witchcraft. Or you can list all the reasons - virtues, experiences, actions, looks, beliefs, values - and build yourself an ideal lover. Yet, that doesn’t seem to work: we don’t fall in love with everyone we meet who is lovable. I have tried to match make often enough, we probably all have to some extent. Wouldn’t Bill be great for Jen? Sue needs someone just like Geoff. Anna and Phil have so much in common…But it only once worked for me with the least likely couple. I introduced them at a party and they spent the evening sitting together on the sofa - in total silence for the most part. And that was that - marriage, children and a dog.
In an odd sort of way that refusal of love to be predictable, manageable, easy to define and pin down is another reason for believing in it. Who could imagine something that awkward? The mystery, the surprise of it, is part of the magic. Is that why it fascinates us so much, why we are drawn to write and read about it so passionately?
Yet for all the mystery, it is there, it’s real, it’s true - and it is different for all of us. As a writer of romantic fiction it is that diversity that absorbs me. People seem to fall in love in so many ways, for so many reasons. And they come to that love from every background, from every emotional state.
For us writers, matchmaking for our characters should be easy, and yet sometimes they will rebel, tell us we have picked the wrong partner for them and show us who it should be. But however challenging it is to write the perfect love for my hero and heroine, whether they are seeking it or whether they are wary of it, I find they are all overwhelmed and transformed by love when it finds them.
And that, for me, is what love in real life does to you, and for you. For ever.
—Louise Allen
www.louiseallenregency.co.uk
#36
I’ll tell you the truth.
When I sat to write this blog a few days ago, a huge, empty thought balloon materialized above my head.
Why ‘do’ I believe in love? For I certainly do.
After wracking my brains, I realized why I was having such a problem coming up with reasons. It’s one of those questions you go through life never asking, or if you do, you think the answers wouldn’t need thinking about. Not so. Not in my case, at least.
Everything I came up with seemed just…not right. So I put writing the blog aside, hoping to come up with what would put across what fills my heart and head.
Then as I drove from work yesterday, I had consecutive calls from my mother, husband, brother, daughter and two friends. After the phone calls were over, I turned to thinking of my patients and their cases, my new characters and their plots.
Once at home, I had another call from a colleague who lives a few streets from me, and who was almost screaming in frustration over the horrendous drive home, needing to moan about it with a fellow martyr.
But I didn’t know what she was talking about. The drive had been extra smooth.
Then I looked at my watch. It was a full two hours since I left work! And I realized.
I hadn’t felt the snailing-by time or cars because I had my loved ones with me, keeping me company, distracting me with the enjoyment of their concern and concerns, with the flow of conversation. After that, love of what I do, in both jobs as doctor and author, filled my head and kept me from suffering the frustration my colleague had suffered.
And it came to me. Why I believe in love. It’s because love, all kinds of love, for loved ones, of what I do, of a job well done, of achievement, of perseverance, of giving, of animals, of nature and of all life makes the same things that would have been bad without it OK, makes OK things great and good things memorable.
I believe in love because of how it has always changed my perception and my perspective.
—Olivia Gates
www.oliviagates.com
#37
So I’ve been asked to answer the question, “Why do I believe in love?”
The answer is simple. My mother. No, not because she set the example of eternal and blissful matrimony. Actually, her first marriage was rather miserable, but that’s another article.
Seriously, the reason I believe in love is because at an early age and with great frequency, my mother subjected me to the great American musical. Yep. She was a huge fan, and since I was born in 1962, right at the height of such classics as Oklahoma!, The King And I, Camelot, and the grand champion pooh-bah of them all, The Sound Of Music, my early impressions of love and romance were all sung to the tunes of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
I was three years old when my mother dragged me to the theater and introduced me to the Von Trapp family, which means at a young age, I associated love with lots of singing and dancing and perfectly behaved children wearing little matching dresses and lederhosen their nun-turned-nanny made out of—wasn’t it sheets or something? In any event, Julie Andrews had just been kicked out of the convent, Christopher Plummer was rich, and I’d learned the lesson that if a girl could sing and dance and sew lederhosen, she’d end up with the man of her dreams. So by the age of 5, I was plunking out chords to Edelweiss on the piano and intriguingly eyeing my mother’s drapes.
That was, of course, until I came across West Side Story. I saw the movie long after all the others had shaped my belief in love, and I hate to say, the movie broke the mold and shattered my ideals. With West Side Story, life became complicated. I found out love could end tragically even though the heroine sang and danced and worked as a seamstress, for criminy sakes!
I thought that Natalie Wood was the most beautiful woman in the world, which made it that much more horrific to find out that all the tried and true virtues no longer guaranteed eternal bliss. Now singing and dancing only worked as long as your lover’s friends weren’t Jets and your brother wasn’t a Shark.
The turbulent 60’s had reared its ugly head and the musical lost its innocence. Hair and Yellow Submarine and Jesus Christ Superstar shoved the love story out of the way and replaced it with Screaming Blue Meanies and deaf, dumb and blind kids who play pinball for flamboyant wizards. Shirley Jones left Oklahoma and became Danny Bonaducci’s mom, and Barbara Streisand rained on my parade by shutting off the microphone for movies like Meet the Fockers.
They were gone, all gone.
But by that time my belief in love was too strong to be destroyed. It simply matured. I ultimately married a man who is tone deaf and hasn’t been able to dance since Bachman Turner Overdrive broke up. But that’s okay. I never was able to belt out “I Could Have Danced All Night” quite like Audrey Hepburn. (Actually, neither did Audrey. She was lip syncing to Julie Andrews.) And with two left feet, I chose to write about love, instead.
I still watch the old classics now and then. My favorite is—undoubtedly and unequivocally—The Music Man. I loved Robert Preston as the proverbial bad boy, rolling into town all trouble with a capital T. He’s shameless. He’s a con man. He’s a shyster. But you knew he had a good heart because he never made fun of little Opie Taylor’s lisp. And, of course, it was meek but fearless Marian the librarian who caught that heart, snagged the man, and gave the town a big shiny band in the process.
Ahhhh, who needs Paris when you’ve got River City, Iowa?
—Lori Borill
www.loriborrill.com
#38
I was always the least romantic person I knew. Even as a little girl, I preferred playing war to playing house. As a teenager, I did have one major crush, but I think I was more attracted to the drama of unrequited crushiness than actual love. In fact, there was only one man I ever loved. I was just 20, we met in a bar. Not so remarkable. A week later, when he called to ask me out, I was sick with a terrible cold. He c
ame by with hot chicken soup. Remarkable, indeed.
We went out for a few years, and even lived together for awhile. Then, my true love dumped me. On my birthday. For another woman.
And that was the end of my relationship with love.
Years went by without any thought to this whole love business. Until I got sick. So sick, I had to abandon my career in the movie business and try to find some way of working at home. My father (yes, father) had always read romance novels. I was one of those horrible people who dismissed the books as trash without ever having read one. I was always buying my father ‘real’ books, trying to break him of his nasty habit. But when I got sick, I figured a lot of people read those silly books, so I could probably whip one out over the weekend, and that would do nicely to bring in income.
HA!
Um, what I mean is, it took a lot longer than planned to not only physically write the book, but to understand what a romance novel was, what kind of story it required and how to not sound like an insufferable jerk while writing it. I took a class, got a critique group (including Susan Mallery and Theresa Southwick!) and stuck to it, despite the fact that I still didn’t believe in love.
Yes, yes, everyone I know in the business warns that it’s imperative to love the genre if you want to write romance. I swear I didn’t know that when I started.
Anyway, I ended up selling a book. Then a couple. Then a whole lot. To my astonishment, I enjoyed the process. Not just the challenge of writing (which has never gotten easier, darn it) but the people. My critique group was my rock - thankfully, they did love romance novels and believed in love, and when I went into cynical bitch mode, they were there to slap me to my senses. I adored going to romance classes and conferences. And inch by slow inch, the ice crystal that was my heart started to thaw.
It took a long while for me to even approach the notion that love wasn’t a Hollywood construct. That real people did fall in love, and that love could be real. I even entertained the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, it could happen to me.