Happily Ever After

My oldest daughter, who is also my best friend, got married last night - July 7th, 2007. It was a beautiful, yet simple ceremony with friends and family celebrating afterwards in a tall building with windows overlooking the city. I sat and watched the many people around me who have touched my life in the past and the present in a variety of ways, especially my first husband, my daughter's father, and his family. Before last night, my life with him seemed a distant faded memory of a life I had been more than happy to leave behind. And yet now at the marriage of our daughter, for the first time since our divorce, I felt something, (possibly gratitude?) for having been a part of his family for ten years. I haven't forgotten the bad times, and they were very bad. But oddly enough, at this celebration of our daughter's marriage, only the good times seemed important, rising through the deep waters of our troubled marriage, up to the surface of my memories. He and his family were important in making me the person I am today. I saw the goodness in them last night and for the first time I felt myself reaching for the threads that I had happily cut when I divorced him, reaching to reconnect those threads to the tapestry that makes up my life. I felt myself making rudimentary ties and knots to reconnect and keep those people a part of my life in some small way because, in some small way I recognize that they are a necessary part of my journey. I also felt strongly that my daughter's paternal grandparents were with us, watching from the other side of the veil, and I felt the warmth of their love for all of us.