By Gary Kroeger
The first line of Ben Fold’s ballad about a special love, “The Luckiest,” struck me as uniquely relatable. “I don’t get many things right the first time, in fact, I am told that a lot.” Folds is relating the idea that he is prone to making mistakes quite often that others see before he does.
I’m like that. Others are, too , I know, but people even told me when the song came out: ” Kroeger! That line reminds me of you!” It must be because I lived with my heart on my sleeve. My feelings about things were always pretty obvious. I get so wrapped up in the idea of something or someone that the narrative I write is often different from reality. At least that’s how I was for many years until I realized, quite late in life, that reality isn’t always a fairytale. Nor should it be. Love itself is the same. It isn’t always a story that ends with glass slippers and a pumpkin turning into a carriage, but is something closer to an episode of CSI where someone goes to jail.
Okay, okay, that is metaphorical, but the point is this: real love comes from real life. Real life has given me a wife I adore, who loves me the same, two incredible sons with whom I share bonds closer than I had even with my own father (who I adored, respected, and cherished as he did his family). And real life gave me my mother, with whom I could not have been any closer.
I’ve been married before, my sons are from a previous marriage, and while that union produced boys that we share with mutual love, our marriage was one of those things “I didn’t get right the first time.” Such was life in my fairytale delusion. It did, however, put me on a path that I still follow and is my motivation every day to embrace life and love. No day passes without embracing my wife, or telling my boys that I love them. No sun sets without thanking my father who passed away 24 years ago for being my role model as a father. And no sun rises without a tear for my mother who left this mortal coil 2 years ago.
My mother was my rock my entire life. At every birthday, holiday, through hard times, thick and thin, divorce, remarriage, and celebration. We bickered at times, disagreed, but sunshine was at the center of every thought. When I think of unconditional love, from the moment of my birth to this, it is my mother’s face I see. After my father died and I became single again (before meeting Shannon), my mother and I agreed to go to dinner every Valentine’s Day. I would not let her be alone on that day because … are you ready for this? February 14th was my parent’s anniversary. Now that’s real life. And that’s real love.