Lately I’ve been thinking about the story my life is telling, and the story I tell myself. They are not always one and the same, I think. Some people might look at the story of my life and conclude it’s a story gone wrong. Maybe they reduce it to something like this: she’s divorced; she’s a single mom. Those might be the facts (or a few of them), but there’s a bigger story than that, and though it may include some sad and even disturbing chapters, that’s okay. Every good story does, and the story I tell myself is not a sad one.In our family we used to sometimes play “High–Low.” Basically it’s just a chat about each person’s high and low that day. We didn’t play it very often, we weren’t that precious. Mostly just on memorable days when we wanted to see the story through each other’s eyes.

In the story that is my marriage and its demise, there are some real lows. But these four here, they are the forever highs. Weighed on a scale, all of the lows are a feather compared to the weight of these four boys. These complicated, funny, and soulful humans emerged from a love story that happened to have an unhappy ending. But even stories with unhappy endings can be good stories, and these four are the proof that ours was a story worth telling. I have no ragrets—not even a single letter