![](https://slantbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/mother-and-son-300x300.jpg)
The Wild Iris
“You are not their mother,” my godmother Shatzi says, as she has from the very moment—a scant year ago—that I became engaged to their father, a widower with eight children: three grown, three at home, two back-and-forth in university. It is quarantine winter—gray Virginia here, icy Quebec at her home far away.