As a single forty-plus year old woman, today is bittersweet. I love my life. I love my kids. And, I know that I have grown over the past years by being single more than I would ever have grown as a married person. Yet, I still feel a small pang of remorse, regret – no, I am not sure either of those words is what I am looking for – as today would be my 25th wedding anniversary.

On July 7, 1984, I wore a long-sleeved ivory dress down the aisle at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Norwich, New York. I had been a Catholic just over a year, having found the Catholic church to feel like home to me when I was in my first year at West Virginia University.

Many things have changed since that sunny, hot July afternoon. The church itself has physically changed. The door I entered and walked into the church proper is no longer a door. The altar is at that end of the building and people enter from where the altar was in 1984.

My marriage has ended.  While I have six wonderful children to show for the hard work that was my marriage, it was not meant to last.  We were not the same people in 1997 as we were in 1984 and the two people we had become were not meant to be together.

I do not wish I were married at this moment in time.  I do not wish I had never been married.  I do, though, with a bit of angst, remember what I was doing 25 years ago today.