Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: In-Law(s) (05/08/08)
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TITLE: The Woman Across the Table | Previous Challenge Entry
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05/12/08 -
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The aging woman that sits across the table from me at mother/daughter banquets is my mother-in-law.
The first year Tom and I were married is the first year this lady attended such an affair. You see she has two sons and no daughters. But, love between her youngest son and I brought our lives together.
She has mothered over me longer than the short nineteen years I had my own dear mother. God took Mama home to be with Him during my senior year of high school. I remember fondly sitting across from the cake decorator with my then mother-in-law–to-be a few days before the wedding.
“I just realized I’m the mother of the groom and the bride. No wonder I’m so tired.”
Like most young brides there where things I didn’t appreciate about my mother-in-law at first. For one thing she had more advice to heap upon me than I thought my small frame could handle. But, through the years we both changed. Maybe it started for her when she realized by love for her son - though different from her own - was the sticking around kind.
You can’t blame her for being a little skeptical at first. Tom was born two months early and went blind from the incubator. A special bond formed between Tom and his mother that only those who parent children with special needs can understand.
I understood better after our second daughter spent two of her first three months in the hospital with bacterial meningitis. My mother-in-law was with me and squeezed my hand when the diagnoses came.
A few years ago she had knee replacement surgery. That year my mother-in-law wasn’t able to sit across from me at the mother/daughter banquet. Something else also happened.
That year I got a Mother’s Day card from my mother-in-law!
She wanted to think me for being a good wife and mother and for being there for her and my father-in-law. I cried as I read her tender words and placed the card in a special place for safe keeping.
In a few days my mother-in-law will be eighty-seven and I am beginning to look out for her and my father-in-law like they use to look out for Tom and me when we were first married. Checking in to make sure everything is all right.
This Mother’s Day I am thankful for both mothers and mother-in-laws.
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Your title made me curious, and so glad it did. Keep writing.