Daddy Delivers

"Hater's gonna hate, but I, for one, have always loved Valentine's Day. I just love love. #andnowiamgoingtoleaveahashtagbecauseiamcleverlikethatallyouneedislove" reads the facebook post of the friend from middle school who inevitably came home with at least two roses every Valentines Day and spent the majority of our bus ride trying to figure out which boy she liked better. 

I still hope she gets flowers every February 14th.

But I haven't so quickly forgotten that feeling of flowerlessness, or the long days when I was that girl that everybody was friends with but nobody was in love with. Valentine's Days were long, and hard, and only worth it because of the chocolate and the homemade pizza dinner and valentines my mom made for us every year. 

But then, one year, everything changed. 

The school day was the same, the bus ride was full of rose-colored envy, and the trudging up the hill to our family's back door was the same. The dog barked a greeting. I carefully stepped around the ice so I didn't fall.  I kept my head down because I was a depressed adolescent. 

And then I opened the door. And because my head was down and I was looking at my feet, I couldn't miss it.

A rose.

Pink and perfect and surrounded by baby's breath.

With my name on the card. 

I picked it up and inhaled the scent. I'd never had occasion to smell a rose of my very own before. Up to this point in my life, the only flowers I'd been given was a small bunch of wildflowers that my Grandpa cut out of his garden and and handed to me on a particularly hard and yet sweet day.

It must run in the family, because when I opened the card, there was a sweet note signed by my dad.

And Valentine's Day never bothered me after that, because I knew no matter how long the day was, there would be a flower waiting for me when I got home.

Throughout my first few years of college, my father delivered the flowers himself.  And I never felt sad when my roommates were all on dates, because I had the best Valentine ever. One year we all got flowers--everywhere you turned in our apartment there was a vase with petal pretties in it. Within about five days, all the flowers were dead. Except my Peruvian lilies.  They lived for three weeks. I took it as a sign that I was the most loved. 

Even as a missionary, he made sure flowers were delivered. I remember the second year that I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on Valentine's Day. Most people know that missionaries are not allowed to date, but I was one of the lucky ones who had someone special waiting at home, so I got my share of romance in the form of weekly letters that never said anything about love other than a "love, Scott" at the end of the page. February of 2010 found me living in an apartment built into a barn on the 5M & R Ranch in Aubrey, Texas. Because postmen don't usually deliver mail to barns, all of our mail went through Brother Martino's mailbox. Very few things slipped by Rick Martino, and I know he noticed that the letters I got most excited about all came from a certain "Brother Fowler" in Sandy, Utah. So I wasn't surprised when I detected a tone of disappointment in his voice when he called on the day before Valentine's Day to tell me that there was a special delivery waiting for me at his house. When we went to pick it up, he handed me the green box with the name of a flower company on it with a frown. I knew what the frown meant. Missionaries aren't supposed to be getting flowers from sweethearts. It's too distracting. It isn't appropriate. I thought you were a better missionary than that. 

I laughed and without opening the card or the box said, "Relax, Brother Martino. They're from my dad!"

And then he smiled. Because he had a daughter on a mission too. Only I think it is a lot harder to get flowers delivered to shacks in Argentina.

I should note here that Scott's pink card came two days later.

The next year was the most depressing Valentine's Day of my life.

You see, I was married. I had a sweetheart. And my dad trusted him to take care of me. And he did. He took me to a wonderful lunch and my favorite muscial, The Music Man, and we sat in the grand tier and I felt awesome. 

But that was two days before Valentine's Day. 

And on Valentine's Day, my sweetheart had to work and go to school and I was all alone for most of the day. 

That didn't bother me.

The absence of flowers from my dad did. 

The next year, Scott and I celebrated early again. And when it came to the actual Valentine's day, around 3:00 I gave up waiting for him to remember what day it was and reminded him, and he delivered a very sweet private blog post on the blog he keeps just for me. 

And once again, there were no flowers.

But I have become a better wife in the past year. And I have learned that sometimes you need to tell your husband what you want and why you want it and then drop a multitude of hints (okay, you should do this all the time, but I'm not a perfect wife yet). 

But I was still surprised when last night Scott asked me to look under the bathroom sink and see if there was any more distilled water for Kevin's humidifier (a post on what I learned from her week-long illness is coming soon). There wasn't. "Check the other side," he said, watching me with a huge smile on his face. 

I gasped as I pulled out a dozen full, beautiful white roses. They smelled better than anything I had ever smelled before. I smiled and thanked him and held them up for Kevin to smell (luckily she didn't try to tear them to pieces). 

"They didn't have any yellow ones," he said, because everyone who knows me knows that yellow roses are my absolute favorite. "But this is the closest I could find."

I told him I liked the white ones. They symbolize purity. And they looked luxurious. And they match the beautiful tablecloth on our dining room table. 

And I know why this year is different. It is because this year Scott is a dad. And being a dad has made him gentler, more thoughtful, more sensitive, and more mine than ever. So this year he knew what to do. And this year, I am happy to say, I am more in love with him than ever. 

And not because he remembered the all-important Valentine's Flowers.

It is because I have seen him grow and change and struggle and overcome obstacles and learn more in the past 11 months than I ever have before. 

It is because I woke up to Kevin screaming in the wee hours of the morning and went out to find them battling on the couch: Daddy wanted to cuddle. Kevin didn't. Daddy wanted Kevin to go back to sleep. Kevin wasn't ready yet. And, when she finally went back to bed thirty minutes later and Scott and I climbed back into bed to cuddle before he went to work, he said something about his relationship with her being nothing but cuddles and battles.

He must be doing something right, eh?

And someday, he will be the kind of Dad that leaves a rose behind the garage door for his 13-year-old daughter.

And she will never, ever, ever forget that he loved her first.