An Enduring Love - A True Story

Picture of my mother and father on their wedding day - 1937

Lately I have been thinking more and more about my dear mother. Is this because she will be 93 years old in August, if she lives that long, and is most likely reaching the end of her days here on earth? Or could it could be because I am getting older myself and find that I am wondering what my mother was like before she was just "mother" in my mind?

What was her life like besides her life as my mother? it is hard for me to think of my mother as being young. Was it love at first sight when she met the young man who would become my father? Did she experience the passions and desires of a young woman in love with her man? Did her heart go pitter-patter and tingles run up and down her spine when she kissed him? Did she long to make love with him and couldn't wait for their wedding night to "become a woman"?

Did she regret marrying him when he decided to answer the call of God and become a preacher? She certainly hadn't signed on for being a preacher man's wife when they married and it changed the entire course of her life. Even if she didn't want to be the wife of a preacher man, divorce wasn't an option to her. People of my mother's generation didn't "do divorce." You made your bed and you lay in it, for better or worse.

My mother and father married in 1937. They had 6 children, one a little daughter who died when she was 2 years old. They lived, they loved, and they grew old together. They may not have had a bed of roses (who ever promised us a rose garden?) but they stayed together until "death do us part" when my father died in 1996. At the time of his passing, my mother and father had been married for 59 years. My father has been gone for 13 years and my mother still considers him as her husband and she is still his wife.

An enduring love story if I ever heard one.