Stick Families

I love Mother’s Day. I love the handmade, homemade cards with pictures of mommies with stick-person babies and round kids with too-long legs and too-short hair living in square houses and smiling half-circle smiles. I love the cards. I look forward to them every year and I save them all in a big jumbley stack.

Someday I will put them all in plastic notebook sleeves and even label them with kid-names and ages and put them all in order by kid, then year; but that day is far, far away because, well, I have kids. Lots and lots of kids.

When people ask me how many kids I have I say “We have five” without missing a beat. Every once in awhile, I will offer the explanation of how he had two and I had two and then we had another one, but that usually leads to having to hear all the reasons why they did or did not like Eight Is Enough and/or The Brady Bunch and inevitably, them saying “Hey! Now you just need one more so it can be two and two and two!!” because apparently families work best and are complete when they are mathematically balanced. More often than not, though, I say “We have five” and leave it at that.

I grew up in what felt like a giant pile of mismatched socks; people were always asking who belonged to whom, and why. I grew up with my mom and step-father, two older step-sisters and my adopted younger sister (whose biological mother was my oldest step-sister). My brother lived with my dad and I visited on the weekends. My step-sisters insisted that my mom and I lived in their house with their dad – that my brother and I were the ‘other kids’. In conversations, I never ever let a ‘your dad’ go by uncorrected when used in reference to my step-father. I never let anyone call my step-sisters my ‘sisters’, but I insisted that no one ever call my little sister anything less that my sister. There was always separation and distinction. We identified ourselves with our differences; displayed our separateness before our similarities – and in the end, are in fact, all separate.

My mother and step-father have long since divorced and after an ugly custody battle; my step-father raised my sister and mom remarried. I never speak to the step-sisters or my step-father but my brother and sister and I are close. My sister is very close to her biological mother – my oldest step-sister – and calls her husband a step-dad. As you can imagine, I have a hard time mapping out this whole community when trying to tell childhood stories to my kids. To this day, I avoid “how many kids were in your family?” because it was just too confusing to recite all the rules.
I glow when asked how many kids I have. I beam. I swell. We have five. All five of them stack up perfectly. They all match. They’re made out of tiny pieces all of us and of each other and we’re all glued together (in our triangle dresses and orange yarn hair) and I thank God daily for every extra minute we get to share together.

Someday, I’ll sit with a giant, nicely-organized binder full of all my Construction Paper Mother’s Day cards in their pretty flat plastic sleeves (in order of kid and year, no less) and I’ll show them all off to all my hundreds of grandkids. I’ll pull each card out one by one and we will reattach each taped-on heart and glued-on button that didn’t make it through the years. I’ll tell them all the stories about their mommies and daddies that I promised never to tell and show them all the embarrassing haircut pictures that they think I threw away.

And eventually, I will make sure they all know how some families are built with construction paper and Elmer’s glue, and that even though our buttons might fall off and our yarn hair might get fuzzy – we absolutely must stay stuck to each other.

Happy late Mother’s Day, mommies – may your Popsicle sticks never be splintery.