My Boys

C's kids are my boys. I didn't give birth to them, but through circumstance and their sheer awesomeness I have grown so attached that my heart couldn't possibly grow any bigger to accommodate more love. Except that it does. Every day. They break my heart with their sweetness and sometimes they just plain break my heart.

The frustrating thing about being a stepmother, a member of the "tribal village" or a "vital parental figure" to a child not of your womb is that you get the full-body joy and pain of raising children - NOW with added boundaries! An already difficult road is made muddy, sometimes.

Being a mother myself, and having the shoe on the other foot with a former lover and his wife, I'm very sensitive to this. I don't want to be called a stepmother because of my own sensitivity to the back-end of that word. I am lucky in the fact that C and I share our perspective on this and our view on the collaborative aspect of his children and my child vs. the weight of responsibility is very similar. We are letting this family grow in the way that is right for us.

But.

(There is always a but.)

When things go awry (or things go awry in the other house that makes up the world of your family) you are stuck with biting your tongue till it bleeds, as LOM so rightly put it, ages and ages ago. And that is tough. You have to live with the decisions that are made, but aside from discussions with your partner half of the equation, you cannot control the outcome.

I was thinking about this frustration and my diplomatically expressed opinions about these precious souls for whom I feel so deeply, and it made me think: Perhaps this will be good preparation for surrendering to the helplessness of loving these children when they are adolescents and adults.

To learn to love fierce and well without control or agenda. That must be valuable! Oh, the difficult and varied avalanche of gifts the road less taken heaps upon your soul.

Reclaimed.

Today, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Lately, I have been thinking about sustainability and community. I think it is all the promise of change in the air - suddenly, buying organic isn't enough - I want to do it in a way that supports my community. Not purchasing new isn't enough, I want to create with my own hands. I want to make do, to patch the tire, to embrace things like canning and jarring and darning of socks.

I want to reclaim all the damaged things, used and thrown away.
Perhaps because I feel as though my country has finally been reclaimed.

Maybe my idealism could be usable with a little wood glue and a coat of varnish. Maybe my patriotism could be darned with a needle and thread, fixing the hole I left in the heel of America's sock. They will never be perfect again, these things, but there is nothing more beautiful than the hard-won character of something of value, glued and fixed.