give me a daisy

Julie

Julie, the youngest of Jim’s girls, was everyone’s pet, easygoing and funny. She was also the girl of many nicknames: Jules to most, Goldie to her dad, and later Wobbles, after one of her sisters teased her about not being able to walk straight. Julie thought that was about the most hilarious word she’d ever heard. When she wrote it down she spelled it W-A-B-L-S, which is exactly how I spelled it—capital letters and all—when I embroidered it in multi-colored floss on a white sweatshirt she wore with pride.

From the time she was a baby, her older sisters and a housekeeper were her primary maternal figures. Somehow she came out perfect, a sunny, energetic child with a great sense of humor who brightened up the room for everyone in it.

night after Julie

Moving in a dream…
I…
Tripping
Through the steamy night…
Blue-gray mystic…
Soft rain dust…
Floating…
Turning inside out…
Touching air
And water
And blonde
And blue-grey child
Touching…
Me.

Julie was a spunky child with love and affection to spare. She seems to have been born equipped to roll with the punches, to take it all in stride. I hope she’s still all that.

Lainie

Lainie, the middle of the three girls, was quieter than the other two, both perceptive and enigmatic–and with an air of self-sufficiency. When she spent time with me, I never had to make any special arrangements or go out of my way to entertain her. She liked hanging out with me and was more than content to tag along when I went to the dry cleaner or picked up a few groceries.

Sometimes the two of us spent an entire evening sitting in separate chairs, reading our separate books, barely talking to each other but always connected.  What she wanted was the experience of normal, everyday life with me in it. Nothing special. A few times she called me “Mom,” in a small, hopeful whisper that nearly broke my heart.

whose child?

I have names for you
and metaphors.

Mermaid.
Lily Maid of Astolot.
Elaine.

I look at you and wonder:
How’d the wheat get in your hair?
and the river in your eyes?
Wildflower,
What contents you
to be domesticated so?
Now ballerina
and assistant cook.
Do you include in these
mysterious ingredients:
ritual dances and magic herbs,
delicate sorcery
to cast your spells?

Fairy Princess,
in exile from your majesty,
You look at me
and only want to call me “Mother.”

It’s so simple.
Why is it so impossible to be.

This giggling girl was wise beyond her young years. Wherever she is, I hope she’s happy and has someone who makes her laugh.

P.S.: She really did own more than one shirt, although for some reason she’s wearing the same one in most of the photos I took of her.

Next time: Julie

Leane

Leane was the oldest of Jim’s three girls and also the biggest handful. A nonstop talker, she needed to have someone’s constant attention. That was why I initially started spending time with each of them separately, to give all of them some one-on-one time.

She was the only one of the three who remembered and missed her mother. How do you get over that kind of betrayal? But whenever she wanted to talk about her, it seemed like no one else in the family was interested. Julie was too young to remember her mother and Lainie, surprisingly pragmatic for her age–or maybe not–had written her off.

Since Leane was curious about sex, I bought a couple of age-appropriate books on the subject and during one of her overnights we spent an evening sitting on my bed looking at the pictures and talking about the strange ways men and women have of relating to each other.

wind chimes

Listen:
These chimes are made of glass.
They sparkle in the sun
And in the wind they make a joyful noise.

Do you know
The joy you reach for so eagerly
Can illuminate your life
Like those prisms of glass,
Or smash into a thousand pieces
Sharper and more painful
Than any shards of glass.

You are a reckless child.

Are you too old for lullabies?
Is that why
I try to lull you instead
With these disembodied words?
Can I hypnotize you into believing
in the natural superiority of reason
in my adult view of things
that everything is all right
and down is up?

So many words.

They circle around your pain
Trying to tell you it doesn’t hurt.
Trying to tell you what to be
Instead of listening to who you are.

Who are you?
Knowledge is a wound sometimes
And people are afraid.
You are.
I am.
But we have chosen each other,
And I can look at you now
And listen to you:
All of you there is
And all there is to come.

Who are you?
Child of love and fear
Wind howling in the night
Love burning a fever
Need tracing a pattern of tears and hopes
on face and pillow,
Daughter of my heart and soul,
I know you–
more than it is easy to know
but not more than I want to know.
You can look at yourself in my eyes
and see someone who is loved.

I gave the poem to Leane. She was old enough. She said she hadn’t known I felt that way about her.

Lovely, lovely girl! I hope the world has treated her better since that rocky start it gave her.

Next time: Lainie

Jim’s girls

Jim was an engineer I dated for the better part of a year. He had three daughters who were, when I first met them, 12 (Leane), 10 (Lainie), and 5 (Julie). His wife had gotten custody five years earlier when they divorced. That’s right; Julie—or Jules, as she was called—was an infant. But instead of taking the girls with her to New York, as she’d promised, she left them with Jim, moved to Florida, remarried, and started a whole new family.

Who could–who would–do something like that?

For a while I spent my weekends at their house, more often than not the one who woke during the night at the slightest sound of coughing or of sleepy, stumbling feet. During the day, I helped them on and off with their snowsuits in the winter and fixed dinner while Jim worked on cars in the backyard with his buddies. It was a cozy domestic arrangement that didn’t last long. I tried to capture Jim in this poem:

aura

Silver.
Softened sometimes
by nightlight:
crystalline
and lustrous.
On rare days
catching the sunlight
and shining.
But hardened mostly,
into metal flakes,
chrome and steel
like your cars.

When we had the breakup discussion, I told him somewhat defiantly that I wouldn’t give up the girls. To his credit, he said, “Of course not,” and we arranged a visitation schedule. He worked in the city where I shared a house with my friend Debbie. Every week during that summer, he brought one of the girls with him in the morning and dropped her off at our house. After work the following day, he picked her up. When I was feeling reckless, I asked him to bring all three.

I left their lives too soon, too, but before I moved from Michigan to California, I took each one shopping for school clothes and shoes. The photo on the right was taken as we were about to head off for a music concert late in the summer. I love how they look like they’re in a police line-up. The day I left, Debbie drove me to the airport and brought Leane and Lainie along to see me off. I remember it being a muggy, gray November day. Julie didn’t come. She said she didn’t want to watch me go. But I gave them a big stuffed animal, a gift from an old boyfriend. The girls named it “Gor,” short for Gordon, the ex. They took turns sleeping with and fighting over it.

I know because they told stories on each other in the cards and letters they sent during the year after I left.  I also saw them when I went home for a visit about 14 months later. But eventually we moved on–or so it seemed at the time. I’ve always hoped I didn’t do them more harm than good by getting so close to them and then leaving. I know I was the lucky one to have had all that time with them.

Next time: Leane