Mother-in-law

In-laws can be precarious entities in a marriage: they can frustrate; they can interfere; they can enhance; they can complement; they can surround you. They can overwhelm you or they can be invisible.

They can make you better.

The Easter Martin I knew (Easter, who was born on Easter, was her given name. It's a name she didn't particularly like) had one gear: she was perpetually welcoming to me, which is really something to say considering that I came into her life and took her only daughter away from her.

Welcoming. Kind. Thoughtful. Giving. Even though she no doubt could be other things, these particular descriptives all come from the same palette. They were the only colors I saw from her. Her colors were true.

It all could have gone sideways in a hurry. I was a Yankee from Pennsylvania, ready to steal the silverware along with her daughter's heart. In the wide scheme of things, Kim and I did not have a particularly long courtship, and an even shorter engagement: perhaps a little over a year between meeting and marriage. On top of everything else, I was nine years older than her daughter, which could have been a roadblock.

Anyway, there wasn't that much time for Easter to get to know me other than that guy who came by occasionally for Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays, eat their food (Man, could she cook. I'm always surrounding myself with women who can cook, it seems) and fall asleep on their sofa watching football games when I wasn't actually on the road covering games as a low paid sports writer for the local paper.

Wait, can he even support my daughter? Will he even be around?

I took Kim to Ohio with me to meet my parents, which is where my folks lived at the time. We were gone several days. I'm not sure how this trip fit into Easter's unspoken list of allowables, but I guess she trusted me, too.

So Kim and I got married, and Easter and her husband, Charles, and Kim's brother, Greg, were always supportive. She became an in-law and all that that implied.

But she was supportive of me and her daughter until the day she died, which happens to be today  – Mother's Day, of all days – back in 2009. It's a calendar anomaly that simply takes my breath away.

So in my heart, I'm taking a moment to whisper, "Thank you. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for allowing me to love your little girl.

"Thank you for everything."