The Right Hat

Dear Jack,

I do not know how or when your dad decided I would be a good wife, but I can tell you the day I knew he would be a good husband. It was December 1998 and I was meeting your Gram's family for the first time. Your dad had gone on and on about how wonderful his grandfather, your great-grandfather Harmon Roberts was. I watched that man like a hawk all evening, seeing what an attentive husband he was, and how the family revolved around him like the sun and I knew right then what kind of husband and father your father, only 19 years old at the time, was going to become.

Knowing that your dad was the right man for me was enough for a long time, but there was a time when I started to wonder if I was the right woman for him. How in the world, I wondered, did a borderline workaholic, emotionless rationalist man wind up with a whimsical woman like me? What in the world would have made him think this was the kind of woman he would want to be with?

Then, in 2004, we went to Aunt Peggy's house for the first time. She had whirly-gigs in her trees, hand-painted furniture on her deck and an honest-to-goodness bridge over not-so-troubled waters in her backyard. Looking around at Aunt Peggy's backyard, I thought back to my first visit to Great Grandma Nolen's Alvin home with the sun room in the back with each plank in the hardwood floor painted a different color and I realized that the house did not come that way and that Great-Grandma Nolen might just have done that very much on purpose. A few years later, I brought Aunt Peggy and Great-Grandma over to show them my backyard, much inspired by their own and Great-Grandma whispered to me, "sometimes I think you could be my daughter" and that's when I knew that your dad didn't just strike out blindly and accidentally find a strangely eccentric woman to be his wife. He found a woman who was meant to be a Nolen.

I was reminded of it again this weekend as I stood in a family picture where everyone was wearing silly hats. It's almost like playing dress-up, except that other than Grandma Nolen, no one is wearing a "dress up" hat; all of the others are mine that I wear out and about, or your dad's, that he rarely wears but likes to have on hand just in case. We are standing around being very silly in our cunning hats and I fit right in (I might have even started it) and this isn't the family I was born and raised in. But it is the family I was meant to wind up with.

And I am so glad that I did.

Love,
Mom