I LOVE YOU!

“I Love You,” three little words that mean so much. I love you… the young say them loosely, the seasoned don’t use them enough.

In my younger days saying “I love you” wasn’t so hard, it just rolled off my tongue. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” Never did I think that what or whom I thought I truly loved was probably not love at all, it was more like infatuation. Yep, infatuation – pure and simple.

As I matured the use of those three words didn’t roll off my tongue as quick, but sometimes I wish it had. It’s seldom that we say these words to people that we really love or people that need to hear them, we just assume that they “know” how we feel. We assume that our actions are enough, “who needs to say it when I can show it,” is our perception. Remember the saying, “I can show you better than I can tell you?” well that’s the attitude that most of us take about saying those three little words. Case in point, unbeknownst to me my husband takes my truck to be serviced while I’m still asleep. On the flip side I’m out shopping, see something that I think he would like and buy it for him just because. Can’t you feel the love? Since it’s been 20 years we just automatically know, whether we say it or not, that love is in the heart. As I write this article I must admit that I should spend more time saying it, instead of assuming that he knows it. With our daughters the story is a little different. I find myself saying, “I love you” probably about 5-10 times a day, but there’s a reason for that, a lesson learned a long time ago.

I will never forget moving away from home after I married, it was during the time that Stevie Wonder’s song I Just Called to Say I Love You came out. Here I was in another country crying my eyes out, homesick, and running up a very expensive phone bill calling my mom to say, “I just called to say I love you.” As the years went by and we moved from here to there this became a routine, saying, “I love you” to my family as we ended our phone conversations. At first this was something new to all of us because we were still in the assumption mode, but after moving away I began to realize how much I loved and missed them and I wanted to tell them so. During out second tour to Germany I received a phone call around 1:00 a.m. on December 23, 1989 from my mother. Apparently the whole gang had gotten together at my grandmother’s and they decided to give me a call. Even though I was still groggy and partially asleep I was glad to hear from everyone. I remember how we laughed, talked about what their holiday plans were, that my brothers didn’t wait until Christmas to open the big box that I had mailed from overseas, and the fact that I would be enjoying snow for Christmas. I remember saying, as we were about to hang up the phone, that I would call her on New Year’s day and my grandmother on Christmas. “Since we’ve called you don’t bother spending all that money calling us on Christmas, just wait until New Years,” she said. On December 30, 1989 I received a phone call about 7:30 a.m. with the news that my mother had died. Through the maze and the fog one thing that has stuck in the back of my mind, even to this day was did I say “I love you” before we hung up the phone? I’m thankful that it doesn’t haunt me, but it is a nagging feeling. So what I learned from this experience was not to let a day go by without telling my daughters how much I love them because I don’t want it to ever be a doubt in their minds. Not a doubt about whether I love them, but a doubt about whether we said it that day.

Valentine's Day has been the day when we usually take the time to show others how we feel. This Valentine's Day wouldn’t it be more special if we just used this time to simply say, “I love you” to our spouses, our children, our family, and friends. Why don’t you make a phone call today and say, “I just called to say I love you.” Not only is it cheaper, but it’s more meaningful and everlasting. NSBIG

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