"Step on a crack...

and break your mother’s back,” we sang
as we hopped down the sidewalks of Ramona,
carefully positioning our toes
so as to do no harm.
But I stepped on cracks all through childhood,
most of them not on sidewalks
but on rules and expectations, such as …
    --stealing penny candy from Pike’s Market,
    --writing spelling words on my arm before the test,
    --reading trashy stories from “True Confessions”
            magazine at my friend Sheila’s house,
    --passing notes during church.

I was reasonably sure that “what my mother didn’t know
couldn’t hurt her” (another wise childhood saying).
In spite of my prevarications, I broke her—if not literally
her back—in all sorts of inward parts of her anatomy,
up until the time she died. Kids do that to their parents.

I remember her last year, bed-ridden,
she looked at me once, smiled, and said,
“Nancy, I’m so proud of you.” She meant it.
She’s whole now, nothing broken.
And she now knows all my silly secrets.
Sometimes I sense her presence. She still smiles.
Still the same message. “Nancy, I’m so proud of you.”

Cracks and all.