Microcomm Publications - Poetry: Stealing the Key

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Stealing the Key
(truly standing up to Mother)
Copyright © 2003 by Dr. H. Paul Shuch

"You're making an awful mistake," Mother warned me, as only a Jewish Mom could,
"And so I am trying to save you. I tell you, this marriage can lead to no good.
I wish I could be more supportive, bestow on you happiness, nachas and luck.
Instead it's as though you were standing there helpless, in front of an oncoming truck.
I feel obligated to stop you from making a terrible, awful mistake.
If you go ahead with this marriage, I'm certain my heart and your spirit will break."

Remember that section in Robert Bly's Iron John, all about stealing the key?
The Prince had to search for it in the Queen's bedchamber, right where Freud said it would be.
There comes a day each man, Bly tells us, must steal the key. Often in anger or rage.
Maybe it happens in youth, adolescence, or later -- perhaps middle age.
But never until he as stolen the key can a boy hope to grow to a man.
That made little sense when I first read the book. I'm beginning to now understand.

My Muriel isn't the love of my youth, or my first wife, or even my second.
Consider remarrying this late in life? It's insanity, my mother reckoned.
Why burden myself with a house full of children, a woman so many years younger?
But Mother can never have any idea of what I desire, how I hunger.
"An awful mistake? Absolutely! Undoubtedly! But don't you think it is time,
At fifty years old, for my awful mistakes to be not yours, dear Mother, but mine?"

Forever the matriarch, Mother still fancies protecting me from my own life,
A life that's made richer and full by the wisdom and beauty of my loving wife.
Asserting myself, better late than not ever, has brought me incredible luck,
For now I have earned both respect of my mother, and love from my dear speeding truck.
I've weathered a storm I could never anticipate when this adventure began:
Perhaps for the first time since I was a fountain pen, now I am truly a man.

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