My daughter, Emma, was fourteen when I married Laura.<\/p>\n
Emma had a good relationship with her biological mother and never wanted another parent.<\/p>\n
Laura understood that.<\/p>\n
She never insisted on being called Mom or tried to force a relationship.<\/p>\n
They were friendly, but I never thought they were particularly close.<\/p>\n
Last month, Laura turned forty-two.<\/p>\n
Emma surprised me by asking if she could join us for dinner.<\/p>\n
We went to a nice Italian restaurant, ordered pasta, and spent most of the evening laughing.<\/p>\n
Before leaving, Emma handed Laura a small envelope.<\/p>\n
“It’s not much,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ten minutes later, I found Laura crying in our kitchen.<\/p>\n
I immediately thought something had gone wrong.<\/p>\n
Then she handed me the envelope.<\/p>\n
Inside was a copy of an essay Emma had submitted for a college scholarship.<\/p>\n
The assignment was to write about an adult who had made a difference in her life.<\/p>\n
Emma had written about Laura.<\/strong><\/p>\n She described how Laura drove her to school, remembered her favorite meals, and stayed up helping with homework even when she had work early.<\/p>\n Then I reached the last paragraph.<\/p>\n “She never asked me to call her Mom. She just made sure I always felt like I belonged.”<\/strong><\/p>\n I looked at Laura.<\/p>\n She was still crying.<\/p>\n “I didn’t know she felt that way,” she whispered.<\/p>\n Neither did I.<\/p>\n The next morning, Laura called Emma to thank her.<\/p>\n For the first time, Emma ended their conversation with, “Love you, Laura.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My daughter, Emma, was fourteen when I married Laura. Emma had a good relationship with her biological mother and never wanted another parent. Laura understood that. She never insisted on being called Mom or tried to force a relationship. They were friendly, but I never thought they were particularly close. Last month, Laura turned forty-two. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10783,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10781\/revisions\/10783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}