Valentine's Day

On February 14th, twelve days before her twenty-forth birthday, Molly opened her apartment door to find a valentine on her doorstep.

Actually she’d been alerted to its presence via a text message from her shy and handsome new friend, K.—whose apartment door is about 100 feet from hers—while she was eating a microwaved frozen meat-paste burrito and a Coke for breakfast. Perhaps K. was concerned she might not find the pink envelope he’d left for her, but find it she did and it precipitated a flood of phone calls home. What did this mean? Was this a friend thing or a love thing? What does one do in a situation like this?

“What about walking down to Walgreen’s to get a valentine for him?” Dan asked.

From Walgreen’s she called to ask if she should get the one with bees on the front that said Bee Mine, or something more neutral, like the one with a cartoon Shakespeare writing illegible (and, therefore, neutral) messages on wee little candy hearts, and also, there were these little heart-shaped chocolates, should she get those, too?—and once back in her apartment, should she write an additional message inside the card, and if so, what should she say?

“Well,” I said, taking the call this time, “you could say something like: I’m happy that you joined the program and I’m looking forward to getting to know you better...”

“Wait, slow down. I’m happy that...what?”

Two days later she called sobbing because her longtime online celebrity role-playing (histrionic, bi-polar) friend—her closest friend in the world for 2+ years (whom she’s never actually met)—was livid about Molly’s exchange of valentines with K. and was now doing and saying mean and hurtful things on purpose.

For years Dan and I have been suggesting with increasing vehemence—but without success—that flesh-and-blood friends are so very much more satisfying than virtual ones. So when Molly announced through her tears, “I can’t do this anymore, Mom. I want to leave the game and change my phone number,” I jumped around the kitchen in silent ecstasy. And despite all the discharges of telephoned grief over the ensuing days and nights, Dan and I, and all the flesh-and-blood human friends we had notified about this important development, remained ecstatic.

Several days later, Molly called Dan all out of breath. “Dad. Dad. I have amazing news.”

“What?!” he said, putting her on speakerphone.

“Guess.”

“K. held your hand?”

“No, but close.”

“He kissed you?”

“Dad. No! Come on.”

“I don’t know, honey. Just tell me.”

“K. just asked me out!”

“Hi honey, it’s Mom,” I said, leaning closer to the speaker. “That’s fantastic! Is he there now?”

“No, he just texted me.”

“And you texted him back?”

“Yes! Isn’t this fantastic?”

“Do you maybe want to invite him to come over?”

So she did, and he did, and there was actual human cuddling on the couch and, a few days later, declarations of undying something, and all of this was cause for a weeklong series of celebratory gin and tonics for Dan and me.

Our gaiety continued for several days until we received a text that sandwiched this breezy message: “A creepy guy just offered me a ride while I was waiting at the bus stop,” between two gushing assertions that K. is the kindest, handsomest, most loving person she has ever known—that she will ever know—and she has never, never been happier.

“How nice,” I texted her back, fumbling for the 24-hour hotline to her program’s director whilst trying to decide if the police should be the first call I made.

After a period of intense investigation that evening, Dan located a five-foot-tall woman with a 10th degree black belt in something who had already worked with a few people on the autism spectrum. In an hour he’ll make the 2-hour drive to Monterey so he and Molly can spend six hours learning how to kick the shit out of a heavily padded pervert-shaped person.

In the meantime, Molly appears to be avoiding our attempts to reach her. We learned from her therapist this week that she canceled a 9 AM session at the last minute because it was “too early” and she was “too tired” ($125 down the drain). From one of the coordinators in her program we heard that she wants to drop one of her classes at the community college because it’s “stressing her out.” In the past, this behavior would mean the beginning of a downward spiral of the sort that often results in her inability to leave her bedroom. Now, however, it might simply mean that she’s assigned a higher priority to the pursuit of human contact on the couch with K.

In either case, Dan will soon arrive to handle whatever needs to be handled, and I have this day to enjoy a quiet home in which there no longer lives a lonely young woman who watched movies all day, and ate microwaved chicken nuggets and chocolate chemical cake, and pretended to be Anna Popplewell from the Narnia movies in an online game with someone who pretended to be James McAvoy—instead of learning to be a human who is truly attached to other humans. For me, a pretty good day.