Valentine’s Day For A Mother Who Is Not Chosen

Today is Valentine’s Day.

Everywhere I look, I see flowers, hearts, celebrations of love.

And I sit here asking myself a question that feels too heavy to carry --

What makes a mother unworthy of her children’s love?

Valentine’s Day is not only for lovers.
It is for anyone who longs to be chosen.

And today, I feel unchosen.

I did not abandon my children.
I did not disappear from their lives.
I did not stop loving them.

All I did was leave a marriage that was breaking me -- after waiting until they were grown enough to understand.

Or so I thought.

Now I question everything.

Was I selfish?
Was I wrong to protect my own peace?
Did choosing survival make me the villain?

Sometimes I look at other mothers who walked away from their children completely -- who started new lives without looking back.

And I ask myself --

Am I worse than them?
Is staying present but separating from their father somehow more unforgivable?

Because the message I feel today is this --

I am the bad one.
The one who deserves distance.
The one who must accept silence.
The one who should understand why she is no longer embraced.

And that thought pierces deeper than anything else.

Every day feels like being stabbed in the same place.
The wound never closes because the rejection continues.

Valentine’s Day magnifies it.

It reminds me that love is celebrated -- but not all love is returned.

I still wake up loving them.
I still carry their names in my prayers.
I still feel that reflex in my chest when something reminds me of them.

Nothing in me has withdrawn.

And yet I am treated as if I forfeited my right to be close.

The hardest part is not the distance.
It is the narrative.

The subtle implication that I broke something sacred -- that I fractured the family -- that my leaving the marriage is the original sin.

But here is the truth I struggle to hold onto --

A woman choosing to leave a painful marriage does not equal a mother abandoning her children.

Those are not the same thing.

I did not leave them.

I left a situation that was no longer healthy.

And yet today, on Valentine’s Day,
I sit with the unbearable feeling that love has been reassigned.

That the other parent is the safe one.
The good one.
The chosen one.

And I am the cautionary tale.

This hurts in ways I cannot explain without sounding bitter.

But I am not bitter.

I am brokenhearted.

Valentine’s Day for me is not roses.

It is longing.

It is writing because if I do not let these words out, the grief will suffocate me.

It is loving children who may not be thinking of me today.

It is hoping that one day they will see that my separation was not betrayal -- it was survival.

If I am guilty of anything, it is loving them beyond reason.

And even now -- especially now -- I still do.