Skip to main content

Mother-In-Law


          I just spent a week with one of the smartest, funniest, most interesting women on earth – my mother-in-law.
          She and I have a lot in common.  We were both teachers.  We both raised two sons and one daughter.  We like and do a lot of the same things.  Most importantly, we both love the same man: her son; my husband.
          I remember the exact moment I fell in love with HoneyBunch and it has a lot to do with her.
I had just told HB that he wanted more from our relationship than I did, and I couldn’t let it go any further.  This would be our last date, but we would part as friends. In conversation, he started talking about his mother and her fights with both breast and stomach cancer.  He admired her for her strength. She recovered from both but never regained her weight.  At eighty-eight, she still weighs less than 100 lbs and wears a size one. 
Though they do not live in the same state, they make it a point to see each other twice or more a year. HB’s family is big on exercise, and the two of them love to go on long walks together.  If she tired, he would scoop her up in his arms and carry her home. She would protest and giggle but loved the attention.
          I remember looking at him and realizing this was a very loving and kind man and I would be a fool to let him go out of my life.
          She loves when I tell her this story, not because it was the genesis of my love for her son, but because it is proof of how much her grown son still loves her.
          I should be jealous of that but I am not. She is his mother and I am his wife. She raised him to be the amazing man that he is and I get to reap the benefits.
         

  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Grandma’s Dining Table

Twenty five years ago my first husband and I bought a new home with four bedrooms and three baths, but my favorite part of the house was the enormous room you walked into from the front door. It had no dividing wall but the design was to use half of it as a formal living and the other half as a formal dining. From the beginning I decided to make it into one huge dining room that would catch the eye when everyone walked in through the front door of my home.   My three children were very young, but I envisioned them grown and married. We counted five at the time, but one day we would grow to eight, maybe more if we factored in grandchildren, so I bought a table that sat a family of twelve.  My husband thought it silly to look that far ahead and convinced me to buy only ten chairs. The room looked magnificent – the long, majestic table, the ten chairs, the buffet, a couple of real ficus, and a few other nice pieces of furniture – I was pleased. The table lasted longer than t
6 comments
Read more