SOUCHERAY: What a wonderful world indeed

Well, I wrote three years ago, nearly to the day, about our daughter’s wedding and being mother of the bride. Now our son is getting married to a wonderful young woman, someone he met three years ago, so now I will be mother of the groom. As we prepare for next weekend and all the festivities that will ensue, I am in awe of our son’s choice of a mate and the joy we can see that has come into his life with her sweetness and her kind manner. And she’s amazingly organized, as well.

Our son actually met his fiancée in my office. She is the daughter of a friend and I knew she had recently graduated from college. I also knew she put websites together, and as I was in need of professional help in this regard, I asked my friend if her daughter might be willing to lend me a hand.

That was in the fall of 2009 and it took me until February 2010 to finally make the call to ask for her assistance. As fate would have it, the weekend she came to help me, our son happened to be home for the weekend from his senior year in college. During his Christmas vacation, he and I had talked about how he thought he would have met someone during his four years. But now that he was nearing graduation, he realized that would have to wait until he got into a job and see if he would meet a woman with whom he could share his life.

On that fateful weekend in February, as his future fiancée and I worked in my office, our son called from upstairs and I replied that I was in my office. He came down the stairs and looked into my office and I could see it was love at first sight. I know people say that happens, and I saw it in living color that day. The two of them greeted each other shyly, he asked me his question, they said their good-byes and he left.

We finished our work and she went home to her parent’s house here in Woodbury. And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, followed by a courtship, engagement, and finally, a wedding to mark the beginning of their married life together.

To have had the opportunity to watch them care about each other, as they have prepared themselves to build a life together, it has been a privilege to witness the love that has grown between them, the respect and admiration they share, as well as their anticipation of the many years ahead.

For parents to stand back and watch this unfold, we hope that just such a day will come for those we love so dearly. These are our cherished and treasured little ones, no matter how big or how old they grow. We want only the best for them, that they will find someone they love and value, as they move away from us and into their own adult lives, to carry on from where we left off.

A few weeks ago, the two of them were at our house on a Sunday evening having dinner on the patio with my husband and I. Our son brought out his iPod and iPod player and we listened to some of the music they had chosen for their wedding dance. There was a fire in the fire pit and he and I realized we had not decided on which song we would dance to, yet. Finally, we listened to Louis Armstrong’s, “What a Wonderful World,” and we knew this was it. As we danced in the dark, with the flickering light of the fire in the background, he practiced twirling me out and back in, counting to the beat of the song, and I knew I would remember that night forever.

He and his fiancée then took to the makeshift dance floor, moving to the beat of the music for at least another hour in the dark, swirling and twirling, laughing, hugging, dipping and kissing as we were blessed by the beauty of committed love.

Soucheray is a Woodbury resident and a licensed family therapist

Tags: opinion, viewpoint