“Are you gonna draw a heart and sign love to your girlfriend?” I asked the Bug, my oldest grandson.
“No!” he exclaimed. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“I have a boyfriend,” interjected the five-year-old Worm.
“No, you don’t,” countered her mom, the GAP.
“Yes, I do,” insisted the Worm. “He’s in K-1.” The Worm is in K-2, afternoon kindergarten.
“What do you do with him?” asked the GAP, in a prying sort of tone that only a mother understands.
“Well, I don’t see him very often,” she answered, full of innocence. We laughed. We all knew this was the “secret ingredient” for keeping a relationship special — very little contact.
“How do you know he’s your boyfriend then?”
“Ruth told me he was,” she said. We laughed again.
“You can’t have a boyfriend yet,” said the GAP. “You’re not old enough.”
“Well, I’m going to get a boyfriend when I’m fifteen,” the Worm said. “Then I’m going to marry him when I turn twenty.” She had it all planned out.
“No, you’re not,” said the GAP. “You’re not allowed to date until you’re…”’
“Thirty,” shouted her dad, Mr. Greenjeans, from the other room.
I called the Worm tonight on the way home to see how her Valentine’s Day went. “Did you get a valentine from your boyfriend?”
“No, we went to the park today and he wasn’t there,” she said.
“Was he supposed to meet you?” I asked.
“Well, I was hoping.”
I have a feeling there’s a lot of us women out there still hoping. Happy Valentine’s Day.
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