Opera star Denyce Graves had anything but a traditional route to her wedding this weekend, but this sure reads like of a story of someone who values the institution. The Washington Post explains:

She was dumped by a boyfriend who no longer wished to follow her around the world. She found herself heartbroken and sick and finally went to a doctor who said he had news — at 39, she was with child. Impossible, she replied: Throughout her previous 17-year marriage she tried repeatedly to get pregnant, but was told it could never happen because of fibroids and various other conditions. Besides, her then-lover had told her he’d had a vasectomy, she says.
But she was pregnant. The doctors urged her to abort, she says, because she wouldn’t be able to carry to term. Then, Graves says, she was told the child had Down syndrome.
But in 2004 she delivered a healthy baby girl — “and she’s perfect.”
So one of the most celebrated mezzo-sopranos of her day became a single mother to a daughter named Ella Thomas, ferrying the infant to concert halls around the world.

She has now married a Johns Hopkins kidney transplant surgeon, who she happened to sit next to on a plane in 2006. The piece explains: “Now 45, she had grown up without a father in Southwest Washington, found her talent early on, married a classical guitarist who became her manager in her early 20s, risen to the top of the opera world, sung for presidents and royalty, survived depression, divorce and surgery on her vocal cords. She’d tried to make things work with Ella’s father after her daughter’s birth, but they just didn’t.”

You get the impression that Graves is a gal trying her darnedest to make her way through the cultural muddle feminism and the rest has wrought. God’s speed.