Love Story

My baby has a girlfriend. He's 10. Until a year ago he still wanted to marry me when he grew up. I was his one and only true love. Then last school year he fell in 'love' with a little girl in his class. She was a sweetie pie, but he never told her how he felt and summer break cooled his adoration.
So this year school hadn't been in session for a week when he came home and informed me that Hannah had 'asked him out'. (What does it even mean when 10 year olds 'go out'?) I remembered a young lady named Hannah from his class last year, in fact I have a delightful little love letter from a Hannah to Jack that I will save forever in my memory box. "Yes" Jack tells me, "It's that Hannah". Two days later Jack asked his daddy if he could cut a Zinnia from the garden and take it to school for her. Then shortly after that he came home with a necklace she had given him.
I thought their little romance was the sweetest thing I'd ever seen. And that was even before I saw her picture.

Because when I did, I realized Hannah looks kind of like me. She has a beautiful smile that goes all the way to her eyes. She's cute, smart and nice . She is also short and a little round. And my boy, he gets all soft and gooey when he talks about her. The other day when I mentioned that she was not a tiny little thing like some of the young ladies in his class, he said to me, in the smiling, breathless way love often expresses itself, "And Mom, she has fat cheeks, too", squeezing his own cheeks in example.

And while I have loved him all along, somehow in that moment, I fell even more in love with this boy of mine. You see, he does not care; he doesn't care that she is chubbier than the girls his friends are 'going out' with; he thinks she is beautiful because she is chubby, not in spite it. And he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. He has a mind and heart of his own. What more could a momma ask for?