Column: What we should always value as acts of love

BY KAREN BEARDSLEE KWASNY

VIRGINIA BEACH — During my years as a college professor, I often used the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by the poet Robert Hayden to teach the abstract concepts of love and duty. The speaker shares an adult’s perspective in the poem as he looks back on his childhood.   

Focusing specifically on Sunday mornings, the speaker chronicles his father’s morning rituals. He remembers that his father rose alone in the “blueblack cold” to stoke the fire, ready the house and shine his son’s shoes. These were weekday tasks done on “Sundays too” while the boy slept in, taking a break. Yet, the speaker recalls barely registering his father’s actions, treating him with the indifference typical of children as they grow into adolescents. In retrospect, the speaker understands his father’s routine duties as acts of love. He asks, “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

I suppose many can relate to Hayden’s speaker. We need only consider what our parents did for us out of love that we completely overlooked as a duty. Some of us can relate to what the speaker learns because we are, now, parents ourselves, motivated by love to fulfill obligations too numerous, tiresome and often mundane to list or sort.  

Take, for instance, an advertisement I saw recently depicting a mother strapping a child into a car seat. Speaking for the child, the advertisement’s message was something like, “I know you love me because you strap me in each day.” Of course, a child young enough for a car seat would have trouble understanding the love conveyed through confinement, but that’s beside the point. The point is that love is the fulfillment of duty and the motivation. Most parents get this. 

I think about Hayden’s poem as we near another Valentine’s Day – the store shelves stocked, despite the backlog on bacon, with boxes of candy, shelves of cards and stacks of stuffed animals holding red roses. I consider the way this day has morphed into a substitute for recognizing those everyday acts of love that sustain us – the windshield cleared of ice before I step out into the cold on a wintry morning, the dishwasher emptied before I commence making dinner, the laundry folded to military precision while sports play on the TV ad nauseam.   

When my husband and I were first married, he argued that there was no need to celebrate Valentine’s Day, as he described it, “that guilt-ridden, over-commercialized day of excuses for not showing love all year long.” 

“We’ll show love daily,” he proclaimed. 

At the time, I thought he meant through the familiar words and gestures of affection – or that he was readying an excuse for a later date. But as the years have taught me – even though gender stereotypes would have things the other way – my husband had a keener understanding of love than I did back then. 

My husband knew what Hayden conveys in his poem – that love is a selfless act, a duty accepted and regularly fulfilled in the rituals of a life with another. It is the drawer fixed that I’ve been struggling against, a new lightbulb in the fixture I can’t reach, more paper towels and toilet paper than we could use in a month of Sundays. It is all of this, and, well, there’s no need for more.  

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice we have this holiday to mark our love for each other with words unsaid and gifts not given at other times. But Hayden’s poem makes me think we would do better if we regularly recognized the everyday duties that are performed for us as ultimate acts of love. 

The author is a writer and former Virginia Beach planning commissioner and professor who lives in Ashville Park. Contact her via email at leejogger@gmail.com.

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