Love is...

So Sandy had stomped across our world with her big, wide, sturdy feet one more time. She'd broken new ground with this maneuver, however, and we were scrambling to regain our balance.

Our turn to wring our hands. These were uncharted waters for us both. We needed advice. What do you do with someone who justifies breaking all the rules?

When I was a kid, a local dairy had a campaign where their sour cream (for dips and chips before we worried about things like cholesterol) was packaged not in jars or tubs but in juice sized and pint sized glasses. With plastic lids and little cartoons on the side. We collected dozens of them in our house (What was with all the dip?) and they became part of our drinking glass collection - right along side the jelly glasses with Tom and Jerry and Peanuts characters depicted on the side.

The cartoon for the sour cream company was called "Love is..." and bore cute little simple renderings of two young people, one male and one female, in varying stages of courtship, often looking pie-eyed or coyly at one another.

And completely naked.

How odd that seems today. I will spare you the political commentary.

But the point is, the cartoons had cute little pictures and says that finished the sentence "Love is..." (http://www.loveiscomicstrip.com/catalog2.php)

Love is ..the little things.

Love is...being together every step of the way.

Love is...come rain or shine.

Love is...not the wrapping but what's inside.

Perhaps we should start a sour cream container campaign for Sandy's benefit specifically. Let's call it "Love is not..."

Love is not ...blaming your spouse for your inability to be happy about anything and that in spite of a very nice life, you've become a bitter old hag with frown lines. (Bring on the Frownies - www.frownies.com/)

Love is not...using divorce proceedings to exact revenge for your disappointment with how your life has turned out, when really you've just reaped what you've sown.

Love is not...using every available means to ensure your spouse's certain misery for all eternity, just because your are pretty sure that is your fate.

Love is not...being incensed at the fact that your former spouse has found love and happiness when you have failed to have so much as a single second date.

Love is not...using your powerful parental influence over your children to encourage insolence and alienation toward their other parent when all other attempts to destroy him have failed. People like that should be forced to spend a long weekend in a juvenile detention center to witness the power and destruction of bad parenting.

Make no mistake. I am not suggesting that divorced couples should or even can, as a rule, love each other. It is pretty darn hard to even be in the same state most times.

But when all the papers have been signed, time should, as it is said, heal all wounds. And while there may not be love, there once was. Enough to invite children into your life together. And so long as there are children, there is a connection. You to them and them to your former spouse. And the more prosperous, fulfilling and peaceful that former spouse's life, the better your children's lives, for the time they share it. How nice for them to know that Mom or Dad is doing okay --- and they will do okay, too, by some sort of emotional osmosis.

It is safe to assume that we all love our kids. So therefore, all the Love Is Nots are off the table when it comes to the other parent. Period.

If only the sour cream company could make it so.