If – In a Daughter’s Perspective

By Bria Crawford

My dear friend Olivia wrote this based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’.

If you can never marry,
see all your dreams rearranged,
and still remain pure,

If you can plan and plot
and it all be overturned at a moments notice,
and still submit joyfully

If you can slave over a dinner all day
only to have a child snub it
then rise again the next day and start all over again,

If you can sweep, mop, dust and scrub,
and watch as a your family walks through with boots and dirty hands
and welcome them home,

If you can teach the same math lesson one hundred times,
only for the child to still not get it,
and return tomorrow and try again,

If you can absorb the troubles around you,
take in the worn and weary,
and never be praised,

If you can remain calm,
while everyone around you gives in to the chaos,

If you can hold the child who got hurt,
doing something you told him not to,

If you can walk through the trials of life
and cling all the closer to God,

Then, then my daughters, you will be women.

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