Step-Mothering

[Abbara]

Step-Mothering

My mother was a marvel!
She raised my four older step-brothers and sisters
Right along with her own four.
Why wouldn’t children
orphaned of a mother,
be happy to join a family circle
completed with a loving mother?
She made it look so easy
I thought she invented Ozzy and Harriett!
I was so young I didn’t see
How well she hid the pain
and sorrowing of step-mothers.

My mother was a marvel!
Because of her,
I agreed to help raise my husband’s four nieces
Adding them into our circle of three.
I had so much love to share
Mother did it, so could I.
I thought it would be easy...

It wasn’t.

We started with two and it was OK.
Then the others needed homes, so they were added.
Now, devastated and desperate lives outnumbered us.
It was an I.E.D. going off
Right in the middle of our family
Our happy home became a bomb crater...
I died.
At least I thought I would...
Mothering in a war zone
was not my finest hour.

About WAR ZONES...
Eventually,
Mother Nature takes them back,
and greens them over.
With a little help from human-kind...
Some careful planting, feeding, watering...
those ugly places can become
a uniquely beautiful flower garden.

This dead woman...
Well, it was just wishful thinking...
Allowed life to return.
Mothers Love bloomed again...
Not as I knew it before...
a delicate, lacey, fragile, gushy thing
But a rugged, deep rooted, enduring and ferocious hunger.
I guess I just grew up.
Step-motherhood did that.

I noticed the strangest thing...
Volunteer blossoms of a hardy sort
Sprouting here in there in the once scarred walls of my crater.
Things I planted long ago...
I watched them wither...
I thought they died.
I’ve been carefully feeding and watering ever since.

In the greening,
I see the makings of a beautiful garden there
... one of these days.

© Abbara 05-15-2010