Erin French

“limoncello I had made. We casually sipped our coffees and made the decision to get married that week: Let’s just do it! There was no downplaying the seriousness of this relationship anymore. It had found its way to a new, undeniably real level the day Jaim piped up with this little, nearly four-year-old voice calling Tom Dad. He had heard Tom’s girls call him that over and over again, the one night a week they were with him, and picked up the term for himself. It was real now, not a game we could play or a fling we could just keep casually engaging in for years. What Tom and I were doing held more weight than I had realized, and the weight of this one word, “Dad,” woke me up to the reality of what I was doing. Every decision I was making was impacting Jaim. As his mother, every big and little decision I made was shaping his world. This fling had become something greater and the responsible thing to do was to make it real, make it everlasting, make it right. Jaim liked Tom well enough, and Tom was kind enough to Jaim. Tom wasn’t”
― Erin French, Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch