Brave Little Gerda Faces the Cutting Winds

[Rita]

Here's a really sad MLC moment for your toolkit --

I always make a huge fuss over Valentine’s Day; when my kids come down, I have the table all decorated and lots of little gifts and chocolates, etc. I also always leave a present for H, in the old days a great one with a poem but now just a small gift. S13 bought me flowers, which was amazing but H obviously nothing and he was gone before we woke up.

We didn’t see him until tonight at which point he gave D9, in front of S13, a box of chocolates from a fancy place, all wrapped up in heart paper. I saw he gave S13 nothing and assumed he had done that before my D and I got home. But I heard H tell D that Valentine’s Day is just for boys to give girls something, so I started to wonder.

So I asked S if H had given him anything and he said no. And I realized that his countenance had totally changed, he seemed really dark after being pretty great the last two days.

My heart just broke for S13. So I asked D to give him some of her chocolates and to say that H wanted her to give him some chocolates because he thought this was a boy-to-girl holiday only. I know we aren't supposed to interfere with their relationships, and it still sucked but I felt like it sucked less than him thinking that his dad hated him.

I know it’s not my job to fix things but I couldn’t stand how sad my S seemed. And honestly I think it was amazing for my D to give up something she had to help her brother and to see how happy it made him. They usually fight a lot.

So we did that. And when I came back in, with some level of happy relief, S told me that H just didn’t think boys should give boys things on Valentine’s Day, that that was why he hadn’t gotten anything.

But after that S13 was still pretty awful all night and refused to go to bed, I woke up after 2 am and he was still up and we had to argue again. He was very angry but when I woke up he had crawled in next to me. Poor guy.

I read often here that the MLC’er often picks one child as the total favorite to give all their love/attention (love/attention being a relative term in MLC Universe!) and is "more bad" to the other children. DnJ comes to mind but so many others. And then of course we know that holidays really tighten the MLC noose. It’s so hard to witness though.