Munch and other darlings

In one more week, this handsome guy will join us for Thanksgiving week, along with his humans. There they are below, all masked up for a team-bonding event with their grad school cohort group last weekend, and at the Charles River crewing regatta the weekend before. And there Munch is, helping his human dad with coursework yesterday. He's grown a lot, hasn't he? My daughter's love is a big data engineer who is getting his MBA, and I'm intrigued by how intentionally sewn into the social life of his program are partners, children, and even pets. I imagine the reasoning is that the students may well be in these same domestic arrangements as they pursue their subsequent careers, and why not fold them into the grad school experience in a relationship strengthening way. I'm grateful that my girl and her guy are able to go through it together, and even more grateful that she got to move to Boston with her job, working remotely for the two years of the program. To my mind, that allows my girl a requisite level of independence, something my father raised me to revere. The recent good news: My daughter's love has already lined up post grad school employment. The firm he did an internship with last summer offered him a full time job, and he has accepted. That means they'll definitely be moving back to New York City when he graduates next May. I could not be happier.

The last picture here is a throwback, taken in the early aughts when my girl was ten and my son was twelve. Look at the loving way we are all gazing at the photographer, who is of course their silly dad and my forever love.

The man and I actually had a bit of an argument yesterday, with raised voices and even some frustrated tears from me, and when we realized that we were both locked into our positions, and there would be no meeting in the middle, much less at either end, we both agreed to just let it be one of those things we would not agree on, and just move on. And we did, with no lingering resentment or vapor. It strikes me now that this is one of the great unsung joys of thirty five years of congenial partnership. You no longer have to be right every time. Or rather, you can sometimes both be wrong or both be right at the same time, and somehow, it's okay.