My mother, who would turn 100 years old this week were she still alive, was not quick to bless my relationship with Michael when it started more than 18 years ago. That’s not a surprise: Michael was younger than some of her grandsons.
“Take it easy,” she told me three months after Michael and I had moved past the friends stage. “Don’t go too fast; I don’t want you to get hurt.” I was the youngest of her five children. I was also the first to be divorced (eventually three of us would be), and she had been protective of me ever since.
What my 81-year-old widowed mother didn’t tell me at the time was that she was also falling in love again. He was an older man she had known since high school.
And when another three months had gone by and the relationships were moving forward, we made a pact to meet in northern Michigan. “I’ll bring my boyfriend if you’ll bring yours,” I told her. In no time, Michael had won his way into my mother’s heart.
Mom and Claus married soon after, and Michael and I followed the next year.
It still thrills me that my mother loved and married again at 82. I thought she was so brave, traveling that road again with a man who was, by that time, 86. But I think now it was not bravery so much as just flat-out plain-and-simple true love.
Like mother, like daughter. When love visits you — the kind of love that makes you know you are blessed every day — it doesn’t matter what age you are.
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