Love Isn't Just for Valentine's Day—It's for Every Day

Something I've always said to my boys — and I mean it every single time — is that I love them unconditionally. Not because of anything they've achieved or anything they own. Not contingent on what they do or don't do. I love them simply because they are themselves. That's it. That's the whole thing.

It sounds simple when I say it out loud. But for a child, really absorbing that — really believing that love doesn't have conditions attached — is one of the most important things that can happen. It shapes how they move through the world. How safe they feel to make mistakes. How willing they are to be fully themselves rather than a version of themselves designed to be more lovable.

I kept thinking about that. About how to make that truth accessible, age-appropriate, something a child could actually feel on the page rather than just hear from a parent. That's where Love Is Everywhere came from.

What the book is really about

I didn't want to write a Valentine's Day book. I wanted to write a book that showed children how love actually shows up — not as a holiday, not as a grand gesture, but as something present and active in ordinary moments every single day.

Love shows up when someone saves your seat. When they listen without interrupting. When they cheer you on even when they're tired. When they stay. The book is built around that kind of love — love as action, love as attention, love as showing up in the small and unremarkable ways that, added together, make up a life.

I also wanted children to have space to express their own feelings while reading. So the book includes prompts — places where kids can write, draw, reflect, respond. Because love isn't just something that happens to you. It's something you practice. It's something you notice. It's something you can name once someone gives you the language for it.

That's what I was trying to give. The language. The mirror. The permission to feel it and say: yes, that's love too. That counts.

What I kept noticing

Once I started paying attention to everyday love, I couldn't stop. I started noticing it everywhere. In the way a grandmother tucks in a blanket even when the child is already asleep. In the way a friend texts just to check in — not because anything is wrong, but because you crossed their mind. In the way the sun comes back every single morning, indifferent to whether anyone noticed.

Love is everywhere. That's the whole argument of the book.

But children's books about love tend to focus on the big-ticket items — family love in the abstract, love as a grand lesson delivered from above. All real and worthy. But I wanted to write a book that captured the actual texture of love as it lives in a child's daily life. In the small, unremarkable, sacred moments that children actually inhabit.

The seat saved on the bus. The extra squeeze in a hug. The friend who knows what you're going to say before you say it. The feeling of being known.

Those are the moments I was writing toward.

Who gets to be in the story

I also wanted — and this felt just as important — for every child who picked up this book to see themselves in it. Not as a token. Not as one character among many who happens to look like them. But as the natural, obvious center of their own story of love. Because that's what every child is.

Representation in children's literature is sometimes framed as a "nice to have." I don't see it that way. I think it's foundational. The stories we give children shape how they understand who matters, who gets to be loved, who gets to be the main character in a story worth telling.

When those stories say: you are here, you are seen, you are the kind of person love happens to and love comes from — it does something that lasts.

That's what I wanted to give with Love Is Everywhere. Not a diversity lesson delivered didactically. Just a book that holds love big enough for any child to step inside, and mirrors big enough for every child to find their face.

The making of the book

Writing for children is its own discipline, and one I've come to take seriously in a particular way. The vocabulary has to earn its place on every page. The images have to be accessible without being condescending. And the emotional truth at the center has to be genuinely felt — children are extraordinarily good at detecting when an adult is performing a feeling rather than expressing one.

I wrote Love Is Everywhere over several months, and the process was different from writing poetry or adult nonfiction. With adult writing, I tend to move quickly in early drafts — following the energy, letting the language surprise me. With this book, I moved slowly. Every word choice was weighed. Every image was tested against the question: will a child feel this? Not understand it intellectually. Feel it.

Some of the images I was most attached to didn't survive that test. Some of the simplest ones turned out to be the most resonant. That's the thing about writing for children: it humbles you in a way that other kinds of writing sometimes don't. It asks you to strip away everything that isn't necessary, and then strip away a little more, until what remains is something true and clean and open enough for a small person to walk into.

Getting there took longer than I expected. I'm glad it did. The book is better for the slowness.

I made it for my boys. And I made it for every child who needs to hear — not just on Valentine's Day, not just on special occasions, but on an ordinary Tuesday in February or a random Thursday in September — that love is already there. It has always been there. It's in the moments you almost missed. It's everywhere, if you know how to look.