Her phone chimed softly on the table, a reminder for her gardening club meeting the next morning, and she picked it up and smiled at it and set it back down, a woman with a life again, with friends and mornings to look forward to and nothing at all to be afraid of.

I reached across the table and took her hand, and her skin was soft and healed and warm.

“Are you happy, Mom?” I asked her.

She looked out over the quiet garden for a long moment before she answered.

“For years,” she said, “I thought that being a mother meant enduring anything, putting up with anything, to keep a broken family together.

I thought that was love.