I did not intend to be a mother

I did. not intend to be a mother, it wasn’t in my deck.

It came to me through a dead boy-man who everyone remembered

despite having been gone seven years already.

He changed my life, they said with wonder and grief.

I quit my job. I left the country. I sobered up. I bought a van.

Because of him, they did so much good. Started orphanages,

Reported on wars, made movies filled with awe.

There was a fork they hadn’t even seen and his death

made them stop to pick it up and turn in an unforeseen direction.

Maybe a life could matter that much.

I did not intend to be a mother, had told the man I was with

not to expect it and to his credit he never badgered

(though his mother sure did).

When I had the first baby I was smitten. I’d hated being

pregnant but loved giving birth—the power of it!

In the deep of that first night my doctor held my face in her hands

and told me: Now, you know you can do anything.

The baby was peace itself — so many photos of her sleeping.

She laughed easily, walked on her first birthday, curiously observed.

Again! - I want to do that again! Like a kid just off the

tilt-awhirl I knew that one ride wasn’t enough.

The first was due on Mother’s Day and weeks and weeks

before my own thirty-fifth birthday. The second was due

on his sister’s birthday but had the grace to wait.

Two springs later, their grandfather, his middle namesake, died.

Three summers after, the marriage ended. We became three.

A woman banker who’d been raised by a single mother

counseled me during the contentious unraveling:

Focus on the one thing you want no matter what.

The four of us became three. Musketeers, Trinity.

So many mother’s days of waking up in a bramble of their

limbs. The first time I got breakfast in bed my observant daughter

having watched and learned the Sunday crepe making

routine, my son ambled in after her as she balanced the tray on the bed.

He clearly had no idea what the occasion was.

She already intuited the work of mothers, but it had yet to

occur to him that this was a form of labor that maybe I’d never

intended to do.

For years, I cajoled him to credit me in his bio when he was in a play.

The Artful Dodger, Seymour, the seagull, master of the house—

he always filled them with inside-jokes to his friends, telling me

I’d get my mention when the right part arrived. Then he quit theater.

I wonder if he’ll return to it some day—a community production when

heis in his sixties and I am in my nineties. At last, I will receive

that recogntion in the little hand-stapled playbill and be reminded

of the bankers’ words: Just focus on the one thing you want.

I wanted two, and I got them both.