0427 We'D Never Have Guessed.. Poem by Michael Shepherd

There’s so much
we never know,
would never have guessed,
never asked,
and now regret that
we never asked,
about what it was like for ‘them’
before we were born…

I can’t remember exactly
how old I was – eight? - when I knew
that Mum couldn’t possibly
have been my mother.

She was so innocent, so simple, yet
so quietly organised,
so sensible, so unlike me
- who was unlike Dad anyway, didn’t he remind me -
that she could never
have had.. sex? .. with Dad..

It must have been my ‘naughty’ aunt, who had me,
‘father unknown’ but conveniently
adopted by my ‘parents’ -
the one who had an eye for the boys
and boy did the boys have eyes for her,
who asked every evening if she could
go out and play with them, while
Dorothy did her homework,
learned double-entry book-keeping by post,
did part-time secretarial work,
became the first female bank-clerk in the town, and still
made the cakes and scones to sell
in the terrace front-window shop
before she went to morning school or work,
while Grandad wheezed in the armchair, sick from the cotton mill..

It was only when my mother, in her sixties, took me
on her annual holiday once to see my
aunt (?) Mary, and the two played one-up
all the time, that I realised the truth of this
familiar family play of life:

Two daughters, fighting for their father’s love,
picking each their role: the one,
doing all the right things to win his love;
the other, forever testing his love
with naughtiness; (she never married, just
played the Magdalene) :
he died, and yet
they carried on their fight; Grandma was
some bystander, I guess. And of course,
Grandad loved his ‘scamp’ so much –
she, the same twinkle in his eye
that he had when he courted Grandma..
Who won, in the end? Neither? Both?

After I saw that, it didn’t seem to matter so much
which of them was really my mother. It would
have been fair if they could, somehow,
have shared me; and maybe, I them.