Another Sweepstakes Win

If there's a sweepstakes for good fortune in a life, I've been a winner more than once. 

My winning streak started with a devoted mother who was involved in nearly every aspect of my young life. Chaperone on trips of every type, cub scout den mother, president of the grammar school PTA. I felt loved and cared for my entire childhood. My turbulent adolescence tested my mother in several ways. She passed, her love for me never wavering.     

If I worked at it, I could perhaps conjure a mother equal to the one my daughter has had. No doubt, like all mothers, she made mistakes with our only child. But ask me to recall anything specific beyond trivialities, and I'd have trouble. Without question, my daughter couldn't have had a better role model as an independent woman than her mother. In that respect, even conjuring an equal is challenging for me.

  

My daughter never knew either of her grandmothers. How then to explain her immediate and undeniable suitability as a new mother other than the adoration and attention her own mother showered on her from the second she entered the world? And so it was, from the first moments I saw my daughter holding my new grandson last October. In her face, her touch, her very essence, I sensed both my mother's spirit and my wife's laser-like focus on our daughter as her life began.  

I now look forward to the day my grandson recognizes he's won the same sweepstakes as me. With a mother and grandmother like his, I suspect I won't be waiting long.