“That’s true. And, hey, now you have another project to work on,” she told me as she curled into my side, taking a deep breath.
“Hm?”
“Well, you’ve built all the beds, nightstands, dressers, toy chests… you were out of projects. Now… you can build a dog house.”
And sometimes, that was how life worked.
Sometimes seemingly bad things gave you exactly what you needed.
That was how our story started after all.
In an extreme situation.
Born out of darkness.
But because of that abyss, all the light was so much brighter.
And our life, as sleepless as it might be at times, was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
Jenny – 22 years
Maisie was sitting across the table from me at She’s Bean Around, her hand wrapped around her mug of tea – the only one of our children who preferred tea over coffee like me, her hazel eyes bright, rolling.
“So that was when he said that if his wife made more money than him, he would find it hard not to be intimidated,” she told me, speaking of her boyfriend of the past three years, having met in college at a party which she insisted was the new norm. “And that,” she went on, giving me a chin lift, “was the moment I dumped him.”
“What?” I asked, shocking back at that, never expecting that. She’d been head-over for him since she met him, something that I often worried about, having hoped she wouldn’t get serious about a guy until she was older.
“Mom,” she said, shaking her head, “if I am going to be a CEO before I’m thirty, I can’t have an anchor like that holding me back.”
And that, right there, was how I knew the cycle was broken, that the past would never repeat itself, that everything that had happened in my life had happened for a reason.
Teddy.
His death.
Noah stepping into my world.
Falling in love.
Starting a new life.
It all led to this.
This amazing, beautiful, intelligent woman who knew exactly what her worth was, what she was capable of, who she could be, what she would and would not accept in life, from men.
“Uh-oh,” Noah said, moving in at my side with his coffee. “Why is Mom crying?” he asked Maisie as he wrapped an arm around me, pressing a kiss to my temple.
I leaned into him, pressing my head against his shoulder, feeling the tickle of a beard that was all steel gray now.
“We did good,” I told him, voice so full of love it cracked.
His free hand went to my knee, giving it a squeeze.
“We sure did.”
XX