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I always thought that at some point I would have children, but by the time I finally found the man I wanted have them with, I was thirty-eight, and he already had eight living children. Four of these children were under the age of eight when we met. When I married their dad, I married them, too. This poem was written at a time when, as inept as I was at entertaining small children in an L.A. condo, I still believed in a sort of magic wherein stepfamilies could connect to become become real families.
Connections
Your daughter breaks her arm and something breaks with it.
She becomes manageable.
Her laugh, softer now sometimes.
She loves writing with her other hand.
Her broken one grows fingernails for the first time
which we manicure once a week.
Sometimes, I drive home slower
on the nights I know we’re going to have the kids,
hoarding a few more minutes alone.
My key in the lock brings them, wanting games at once.
You, exhausted, irritable on the sofa,
wanting them yet wanting them gone.
In a movie, Mary Tyler Moore saying
she can’t love the son who needs her love too much.
Can’t love on demand?
Dirty fingernails, torn knees on Levis—
Our rag-a-muffins,
driven down to our city life
where they demand the mall.
Not the way I pictured it.
They call me Mom immediately after the wedding.
I scrub their fingernails,
put medicine on cold sores,
tell Jodie not to wear those torn-out pants to school anymore.
The other kids, I say, will talk—
what my mother would have said to me.
When I tell them at the office
about the homemade Easter decorations
hung on our refrigerator,
about the one that reads “to Mom,”
Jim says he prefers Elliott’s stories.
When I tell them that the littlest grabbed my knees
and hugged and said, “I just love you,”
the clever crowd around the copier groans.
I’m not a mother, they all understand,
and once a week, I barely get good practice in.
But when your daughter breaks her arm,
I try to find a spell to stick us all together—
paper, scissors, colored pens.
I say, “Try to keep the glue off the dining room table.”
I say, “Try not to drop the magic markers on the floor.”
“Take off your shoes when walking on the white sofa.”
Poignant reading and it must have been cathartic to write it, Judy. Raising one’s own flesh and blood children is challenging enough. Raising someone else’s kids and trying to do it well being given only 1 day a week would be next to impossible. Kids don’t miss a beat and I’m sure they took in the kind bits as well as the unease from you and their dad. I have yet to meet anyone who started out as a child — i.e. all of us — who hasn’t had some sour with the sweet. You did the best you could at the time.
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Some of them are now older than I was when I wrote this, Lisa, and they are all parents and the girl with the broken arm is a grandma! I actually loved marrying “into” kids.
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The words of someone with a huge task well written
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Thanks, Derrick. Now they are all parents and some of them are grandparents! Seems impossible.
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Thanks, Derrick. I don’t recall the task being that huge. More rewards than drawbacks. As with most kids…
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Absolutely loved the poem. No doubt many can relate to those wise and truthful words. I liked the photos you found of connections we all might see, literal connections. Wonderful, Judy. Thank you.
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Thanks, Donna. I decided to take the subject literally.
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I like that. I wanted to do more of that but my ideas flowed in another direction.
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What a beautiful heartfelt post Judy 💐 I love your interpretation of the challenge.
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Great photos of great connections. Very innovative.
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There is a story behind this poem, I suspect.
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I love when you wrote “When I married their dad, I married them, too.” Wonderfully put and your poem feels real.
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Thanks, Sofia. That poem is in my new book If I Were Water and You Were Air, which will soon be out on Amazon.
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Wonderful poem, Judy. And all your connections added in a different and special way.
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Fun set. You got far taking the topic literally
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