Sometimes I was jealous of them, because they seemed to be able to become mothers without giving up what I had. At other times, I felt sorry for them because they had so much to do, so many responsibilities. I had loved being a stay-at-home mother. I had found deep meaning and spiritual purpose in it at the time. But looking back, I also wondered if I had ignored too many other things going on around me. Politics, inside and outside the church, bigger issues that had been brewing for a long time and now had gaped open a maw large enough to threaten everything. If I’d faced those issues earlier, maybe I wouldn’t be in the position I was in now. But on the other hand, I had five wonderful grown sons, and I couldn’t regret that.
“I can help,” I offered impulsively, and it was the first time I’d felt the energy to help someone else since the fire. “If you need someone to care for Talitha. She’s a great kid and I’d be happy to watch her for you on a regular basis, if you need me.”
Naomi’s face brightened and she seemed younger, or at least less weighed down. “Really?”
I nodded heartily.
She grabbed my hand enthusiastically. “Thank you so much! I’ve been worrying over how I can juggle all these things.”
“You know, being a mother doesn’t mean you can’t rely on other people for help. It’s not necessarily a sacrifice for other people to be involved in your family,” I said. It could be a gift to someone like me, who was still looking for ways to be a mother.
“Can I call you Mom?” Naomi choked a bit.
It felt so good to fold her into my arms and feel like I was widening the circle of my family yet again. I should have told her to call me Mom long before now.
“I’d be honored,” I said.
She pulled back so she could look at me directly. “I’d heard people say that when you marry, you marry the whole family. That used to frighten me. I worried as much about anyone needing to fall in love with my family as I did about falling in love with someone else’s family. And I worried that my love had already been stretched to the limit with so many siblings, so many mothers. Maybe there was no more space in my heart for anyone else.”
“But it isn’t like that, is it?” I said.
Naomi wiped at her eyes. “No,” she said, “it isn’t.”
Chapter 35
As a Mormon bishop, Kurt was authorized to officiate at weddings anywhere, not just in our home chapel. He had never done it for a couple that wasn’t Mormon before, but there was no reason why he couldn’t (so long as it wasn’t a same-sex marriage, according to the new policy’s rules). Kenneth and Naomi asked him to officiate in the Draper City Park on the 26th of August, 2016. We didn’t want to have to try to squeeze both of our large families into a restaurant, so I had reserved several pavilions for the catering service to deliver the wedding banquet to us there.
It was painful to let someone else do all the cooking, but Kurt had insisted, and he was right that I simply couldn’t have managed everything on my own this time. I’d tried before, with Adam and Marie’s wedding, and with Joseph and Willow’s, but in both of those cases, I’d had months and months in advance to plan and cook and put things in freezers to prepare. And I had been younger then. And not just out of the hospital and dealing with a lot of emotional baggage.
Dawn was bright and early on the day of the wedding, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There was no inversion clouding the skies and making it difficult to breathe either, which felt like a blessing from God. I spent a moment staring down into the valley from my bedroom window and thought how different Utah in the summer was from Utah in the winter. The glint of light off the lake brightened everything, and the sky stretched from the Wasatch Mountains in the east to the smaller Oquirrh Range in the west, creating a safe space that the pioneers had needed when they arrived, battered from mobs in Nauvoo. I needed this space, too.
Kurt and I dressed in our wedding clothes, me in a rose-colored, flowing mother-of-the-groom gown and him in a matching tie with his black suit and the rainbow ribbon he had started to wear with his suit every week to church. Except for a couple of teenagers throwing a Frisbee around, we of the wedding party were the only people at the park that morning.
Naomi had chosen a vibrant pink bridal gown that fell to just below her knees. Her blonde hair was down, and it blew in the light breeze. She wore sandals of a natural leather color with no heels. Kenneth wore a beige linen suit. I stared at him when I first saw him, surprised at how good he looked. With a slightly rumpled white shirt underneath, my son looked at ease despite the formal wear. His deep tan was set off by the lighter colors, and there was a faint scar on his cheek that I knew had come from the fire.