Title: Hidden Gifts
Author: Elena Aitken
Quote: "'Hidden gifts'....'They're the best kind.'"
Morgan has always felt called to be around children. She's earned a degree in the subject. But when she learns that she can't have children of her own, she doesn't want to work with children for a while.
That's until Ella, the daughter of a single father who works with her at the Castle Mountain Lodge, is plopped down at the "Cubs' Club," the lodge's guest daycare facility. So far this season Ella is the only child there. Morgan was working somewhere else, but the manager sends her to the Cubs' Club because of her education. She's stuck. Despite her reluctance to be there, Morgan and Ella bond.
Her bond with Ella even makes Morgan reconsider Ella's father, Bo, a playboy type who's turned her off by bragging, "I don't do relationships." Bo has never wanted to spend two nights in a row with one woman, but something about being a father, watching his daughter bond with a woman who'd make a good stepmother, affects his hormones and...
It can happen. It's not to be relied upon. Humans' pheromone receptors and responses are weaker than the lower animals'. As a species we cannot reliably determine whether or not a given child is ours; a woman may know that she's given birth but, if the child's been adopted, after a few years Men's ability to spot their own offspring is even feebler: the ancient Romans may have allowed a mother's husband to claim or disown an infant, but the ritual of his claiming the child had to have been understood as a commitment to rear the child, not a positive ability to know whether or not he was its biological father. Nevertheless, in some dim unconscious way, biological fathers do seem to be better fathers--more likely to spend time with the children, less likely to abuse or molest them--than stepfathers are. It's almost a cliche in fiction, because it's so often true in real life, that people burdened with emotional complexes about how badly their fathers treated them feel a great relief when they find out that those men weren't their fathers.
Anyway, watching Ella play and snuggle with Morgan starts that long-forgotten record of "Isn't She Lovely" playing in Bo's mind. Suddenly he wants to marry Morgan, although he's panicky with fear that marriage might not always be one big emotional "high."
It makes one wonder: If Bo had been disciplined enough to stay with Ellas mother when Ella was born, would he have fallen in love with her, too? Would she have survived? (We're not told how or why she died, but apparently she and Ella were very poor.) Or would things have been even worse when Bo realized that marriage, fatherhood, love, and life itself for that matter, is not one big emotional "high"? Everybody enjoys the emotions of a romantic comedy; paradoxically, we're likely to enjoy them more often in real life if we understand that they're not going to last long, that a good life offers occasional bumps of "high" and "low" in a baseline of unemotional general contentment.
You have to pity people like Bo and Morgan, trying to get through this world with only emotions to guide them. If you enjoy reading about the good times in such people's lives, here is a story about those.
Did I mention Canadian Content? The lodge is on the north side of the border; this whole series is solid Canadian Content. It's well written, and has sold well n Canada. It's pleasant reading in any country.
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