Time brings that kind of perspective. It did for Lambie, who would one day come to know the dread that takes hold when a parent is certain that a beloved child, on the cusp of adulthood, is about to make a consequential mistake. And how much willpower is required to let her do it, anyway.
***
Bunny Zgorski wanted to be a woman of the world. Travel had never topped her parents’ agenda, but she was adventurous. She double-majored in international business and Spanish and became a sales executive for Nestlé, a company she thought might someday take her abroad.
But in 1989, friends set her up with a former competitive swimmer who worked in real estate. He was nice enough, so she agreed to a second date. He picked her up at her parents’ home, and when she sat down for breakfast the next morning, Rita declared: “You’re going to marry that guy!”
“No,” Bunny insisted. “I’m not going to marry him. His last name is Lamb. I will not be Bunny Lamb for life.”
But on the third date, they kissed under Fourth of July fireworks and something changed. “I just really, really liked him,” she says. “And I never looked back.”
Not quite two years later, she walked down the aisle in the dress her mother and sister had worn. “I felt very special. And I felt this connection to my parents,” she says. “I just remember having that feeling of ‘How lucky am I?’ ”
Greg wanted two kids; Bunny always imagined a large family like the one she grew up in. They settled on three. Rita’s knack for organization was magnified in Bunny, now a consultant in Potomac who helps families set up chore charts and filing systems.
And as her family grew, the former ambitious traveler found herself focused on home. “I could be a homebody and do things all with the kids and for the kids,” she says.
In contrast with Bob and Rita, who to this day rarely take long trips out of fear that one of their children or grandchildren will need them, Greg’s parents always valued travel and an active social life.
“Greg and I always say, ‘We need to be a balance.’ Because they’re both great parents in different kind of ways,” says Bunny, now 46. So they go on weekly dates as her in-laws do, and she stayed home to raise their kids as her own mother did.
***
There are certain traits all the Zgorski girls inherited from their mother. They are fast talkers and great hostesses. They laugh loudly and say things like, “Oh, my golly.” Above all, they’re doers: women who always have a project underway and are quick to help whomever is in need. Especially if it’s one of their own.
Kitten was the sensitive one who saw the world through rose-colored glasses. Even as a girl, she loved old people and babies, and couldn’t wait to become a wife and mother.
In the early 1990s, her younger sister Dovey said there was a man Kitten needed to meet. At first the new guy didn’t seem like a match, but somewhere along the way Kitten fell in love. They were engaged after a year.
Kitten, who now goes by Kitt, had never been happier than when she wore her mother’s dress on her wedding day in 1994. “You guys were just beaming,” she remembers people saying.
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