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be remiss if I didn’t include my husband’s family in this post as well. His father’s parents were married over fifty years before Chad’s grandfather passed away. His mother’s parents have been married sixty-eight years, and my husband’s parents have been married for thirty-nine years.
    My husband and I? Surrounded by these examples, we’ve been together for twenty years, married for nearly seventeen. (Like the mullet and the poofy veil?)
    We’ve laughed and cried and argued and fought (Oh, we’ve had some doozies!) and gone silent, but love has brought us through. Unlike Hollywood marriages where five years is considered extraordinary, we’ve seen and lived the proof that long marriages are possible. But they take a lot of work, dedication and good, old-fashioned sticking-power on the part of both parties, not just one.
    I believe in love because I believe deep in my heart and soul that love is more powerful than hate. Love is the ability to forgive the slights and the arguments. Love is the kindness shown not only to each other, but to strangers in need. We’ve all experienced this type of love, even if we haven’t experienced marital longevity or bliss. Love is holding a door for the elderly or a frazzled mother pushing a stroller, delivering food to a family who mourning the loss of a loved one, donating clothes to a family burned out by fire, or sending a card to a friend down in the dumps. Where hate is destructive and ugly, love is beautiful and uplifting. It can’t be bought. It can’t be sold. And it even includes morning breath and bed-head, bad moods, weight gain, PMS, mid-life crises, and thinning hair. Love conquers all these things and more.
    — Kay Stockham
www.kaystockham.com
www.Noveltalk.com
    #29

    I’d like to tell you three stories about my mother. A woman with a kind and fierce heart, she would face down a dragon if it threatened those she loved. Her clever humor more than once split my sides with laughter, and her mere disapproving glance could freeze me with guilt and remorse when both of us knew I done wrong. She was tolerant and fair, accepting of the differences and divergences in humanity. She was one of the strongest women I knew, with a spectacular creativity that in another time and place might have led her down the career path her daughter followed.
    So…story number one. My parents’ marriage didn’t last long, less than a decade. Mom and Dad were better at being friends than being husband and wife. They divorced when I was fairly young (a traumatic and confusing time for me and my two older sisters), but I never saw a whit of animosity between them.
    Around that time (early sixties), the courts in California decided in their wisdom that non-custodial dads should pay their child support to the courts instead of directly to their ex-wives. A law-abiding guy, my dad complied. But there was a fly in the ointment—the courts took their own sweet time turning around that money to the custodial moms. Since she needed the money now, instead of whenever the court got off its butt to give it to her, my dad started paying double—one check to the courts, one directly to my mother.
    But Dad didn’t have the wherewithal in those days to continue to write those two checks. So he stopped paying the court and sent the money directly to my mom. Big trouble descended upon him, requiring him to appear before a judge. My mother attended the hearing with him, clouding up and raining all over that judge, telling him that my dad was a good, responsible man, that the courts were at fault, that my dad had faithfully paid every penny of his child support obligation. In the face of my mother’s fierce defense, the judge agreed to a dispensation, allowing my father to henceforth pay my mother directly. She showed a different kind of love that day than that of a wife for her husband, but it was love nonetheless.
    Story number two. My mother met Harry at the hospital where she worked in the