mildred

This is the most beautiful picture of Milly that I can recall ever seeing. She looks just perfect to me, happy and calmed. Milly was my mother-in-law. She died two years ago this summer. It may seem that this entry is beginning too personally, but we are all anchored in our lives with relationships that sometimes encourage and sometimes discourage growth. My relationship with Milly was diminished by the fact that we both let our relationship to our spouses limit our own growth. Said another way, neither of us was very good at taking responsibility for our life. We were emeshed in others' lives, pretty certain that if we would disentangle from those knots, we would lose everything.

So I don't remember her to have been as happy as she appears standing beside her sister and an unidentified younger woman and I wonder how I appeared to others. 

A few years ago when I walked into my vacuum repairman's shop, he immediately stated, "You've changed." And I had. How interesting that he noted and found words for the transformation I had painfully made into a truer version of myself.