Dear Lady on the Treadmill
Today I exercised beside you in the gym both of us striding on our treadmills. You told me all about your beautiful daughter and your shidduch search to find the very best husband for her. I heard all about the handsome boy from a well-to-do family and about his scoliosis and his limp that makes him as you said “walk funny.”
“Why should my daughter have to settle?” you loudly proclaimed. “She’s beautiful!”
I went home and looked at my own beautiful daughter. She’s funny determined and at the top of her class. I thought about her scoliosis and about her battle with cancer that caused it. I thought of the four surgeries she endured and the endless physical therapy sessions. I thought about the years we were terrified that she would never be able to walk on her own because that was the future the doctors envisioned for her.
And I thought about her first steps how each was a gargantuan struggle. Even now years later she often has a hard time doing the physical things so many of us take for granted.
