The Embrace

After a busy trip east to visit family we are back home safe and sound! I’ve made plans to get away this weekend and write, and after that I might be finished with the book, in terms of content, but then comes editing (booo). I accomplished next to nothing while we were away, so I hope this weekend will be productive. The last time I went away I wrote a chapter I’m particularly proud of, so there is a bit of pressure to make the trip fruitful, both because I need to make progress, and because I’ll be leaving Hubs alone to run the circus by himself for two nights. Pray for him.

Writing this book has been easy in terms of plot, because it’s based on facts and previous blog posts, but difficult because if nothing happens I have nothing to write about, and how do I know when I’m finished? There is no conclusion to my story because it’s still happening! Because you are all such nice people who share my blog and support me with every re-post, I will share another snippet from the Mothers series in the book. This one is about my mother-in-law, so you can imagine the trepidation I felt telling her story, but I’m lucky that she is lovely and only took issue with my grammar. That’s why the kids call her Grammar, after all!

Mothers: The Embrace

….When your son is brilliant, graduating from college in only three years, and planning to get another stack of diplomas after that, an engagement at twenty years old seems a bit out of the blue. Both my future in-laws are highly educated, and both had some romantic messiness disrupt their lives before they found each other, so they had concerns. Who was this girl who wanted to get engaged at nineteen? Was she smart? Was she hitching her wagon to their son because she saw a star on the rise?

My parents had similar questions, and both families cooled when we told them we didn’t plan to get married until I graduated from college, three years down the road. I would not be surprised to hear that just about everyone who knew we were engaged expected things to fizzle out before we ever walked down the aisle. We were kids! What did we know about love?

To her credit, my mother-in-law never made me feel like I was stealing her son away, at least to my face. Was she stabbing voodoo dolls in my absence? I doubt it, but it had to be difficult to lose her first born to another woman. Of course, she didn’t really lose him. Hubs loves and respects his mother, and with good reason.

Marilyn grew up in Iowa with five brothers and sisters, became an accountant for the IRS with the unhappy task of repossessing the homes of elderly tax evaders, and relocated to Houston to escape the daily threat of frostbite. She met Bob in an airport, and lucky for him, they were headed to the same destination….

 

More coming soon!