"It's like she's my own child," says Janet.

"I'm closer to her than to my own mother," says Carmen, her words making a mockery of every snickering mother-in-law joke ever written.

Their tale began in 1985, when John brought Carmen home to meet Janet and his dad, Jack, who live in Delaware. He told them he was very serious about Carmen, a second lieutenant in the Army, stationed at Fort Dix. They'd met when Carmen called the Center City gym where John worked to ask about membership rates.

"He fell in love with her voice," recalls Janet, 68, who is white.

Ah, her voice. Carmen, who is black, is a native of Trinidad, and her accent is as beautiful as her smile. But it was her soft heart, John told his mom, that had won his own.

"He said, 'You'll love her. She's just like you,' " says Janet, a poet and quilter with a disarming laugh.

Janet and Jack, whose ethnic backgrounds are German, Italian and Irish, fretted anyway. They had taught their children - they also have two grown daughters - to be color-blind, to accept everyone for who they were. Still, they never expected their son to absorb the lesson in such a big way.

What if they couldn't get past their obvious differences?

Carmen was worried about more than the racial and cultural diversity she was bringing to John's Anglo-Saxon family.

"I know that when there's only one son in a family, the mother can be very hard on the woman who marries him," says Carmen, who has a son, David, from a previous marriage. "She might not want to share him. You have to make your peace with it and learn how to fit in. I was nervous."

She needn't have been. When the two women met, their connection was instantaneous. As hearts opened wide, surface differences disappeared.

"I felt like one of the family, from the very beginning," says Carmen.

Over the next decade, the love grew as Janet became like a grandmother to Carmen's son, whom John also treated like his own. And it deepened further when Carmen cared for John through the leukemia that eventually took his life. He'd been in remission from the disease for years when he met Carmen. By their 10th anniversary, though, he was in the hospital, dying.

"I couldn't be with John toward the end because my husband had had a stroke," says Janet. "But for three months, Carmen never left his side."

When John died in 2005, Carmen says, she felt "like I'd lost a whole world. Not just John - his whole family. I didn't know if I'd still be one of 'them' with John gone. I didn't know if we'd still be connected."

Neither Janet, Jack nor John's sisters, though, ever considered letting go of Carmen. They simply didn't know how to let go of all that love.

In the three years since, Carmen and Janet have become even closer. Weekends, birthdays, holidays are as family-centered as ever. And Carmen frequently travels from her home in Upper Darby to the McCall home in lower Delaware, to drive Jack and Janet to Arlington National Cemetery to visit John's grave (he'd been a military-intelligence officer).

Carmen squeezes these trips around a packed schedule. She works full time as an assistant coordinator of social services at Fort Dix, where she counsels returning Iraq vets. And, in the last few years, she has earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from La Salle University, a master's in criminal justice from St. Joe's and, this Sunday, will receive her certificate in intelligence and security studies back at La Salle. Her son will also receive his degree there, in criminal justice.

Cheering them on in the audience will be Janet and Jack. That it will be Mother's Day will only sweeten their celebration.

"I'm in awe of her," says Janet of Carmen. "She's as much of a daughter to me as my own children. She brings us joy."

Joy? Awe? Love?

Just try to make a mother-in-law joke out of that. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

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