SlushAnon
Oh, the naïveté! The sweet, young, innocent ambitions and dreams of a thirty-something new bride. Armed with determination and faith, embarking on the excitement of a new life. Happily going about her day with visions of a perfect family swimming in her mind: her new husband, herself and her 21-year old stepdaughter. One big, happy…..
….except, wait, what’s that? Someone’s not happy….
That can’t be, I said. There is a misunderstanding, I thought. Why the harsh words? Leading up to the wedding, and at the wedding she was fine - excited even. What happened?
He said to stop buying so many presents at Christmas. He said I was babysitting her son too much. He said, slow down, you’ll be hurt.
It was 2005. I had been divorced about 3 years. I had no intention of remarrying at all because of a mentally abusive first marriage. But when I began to develop feelings for a man at church, I prayed about it, and decided that, indeed, it was God’s plan for me to remarry. I continued to pray and when he proposed, I said “yes” knowing he had a grown daughter.
What I didn’t know was the scope and extent of what that really meant. I came from a home where my parents stayed married and never argued, so I had no context or personal life experience for parents that didn’t make it as a couple. Looking back, almost all my childhood friends’ parents stayed married. It’s not that this generation didn’t have marriage problems. Divorce was still a taboo word in those days.
She came from a home where her mother and father divorced when she was 3. Her mother met my husband shortly after, and they moved in together. He raised her as his own daughter for the next 10 years until her mother and he parted ways. When he introduced her to me, he said “This is my daughter.” He didn’t say “This is my adopted daughter.”
In all this time, from her infancy to her early 20’s, her biological father lived several states away. He never visited her, nor sent money or cards to her. He never called to check on her.
And, this, THIS, is the crux. Because, sometimes, an absent father results in an insecure child. And, in this instance, indeed it did.
She did not come to me labeled as insecure. Or fearful. Or bitter. She came to me a woman in her own right, with legitimate holes in her heart, and valid questions stemming from the mind of a child who’d been abandoned first, then yanked from the security of having a stable, loving father in the house to the insecurity of not.
She came to me having a bond with her biological mother deeply forged in the up-and-down flux of a poverty lifestyle, where survival makes you say and do things you might not otherwise do.
I had a personal goal of babysitting her son once a month. This was now my grandson! With the exchange of “I do”, I had acquired a family package, grandkid and all. I jumped into the deep end with such force that foreigners on distant shores must have felt that wave on the other side of the planet. With a heart bursting for a free flow exchange of love, and never once thinking not everyone else wanted the same, I dove headlong in to the perpetrated lie of the “perfect family.”
In church, I proudly showed off my new grandson. To my own family, I proudly showed pictures of family trips to the zoo. For holidays, we drove to their home with lawn-size trash bags full of presents. Presents that filled the car to the roof. Presents I bought with such excitement - picturing my grandson’s face as I paid for them.
My husband, watching from the sidelines, said, ”Stop. You’re doing too much.” I brushed his assessment aside. What? Me, doing too much? This is my daughter, my grandson! It’s impossible to do too much! Even when my grandson opened all his gifts, looked up at us and asked “Is that all?,” I still didn’t begin to dismantle the illusion I had created.
While waiting at a car wash, my 7-year old grandson was going through my purse. I instructed him to stop. He didn’t like my correction. I explained the concept of boundaries and asking permission to the best of my ability. He felt I was being too harsh, although I was just talking normally. When I explained this relatively benign scenario to his mom, she yelled that her father and I hate children and would never be allowed to see her son again. I was crushed. Didn’t she know how much I cherished and loved him?
A few months later, it was Mother’s Day. A day I’d come to dread. I don’t need to be reminded of what I don’t have. Of how I don’t fit in or of how I’d let my parents down by not producing a bevy of grandchildren for them to babysit and spoil.
When I married my husband, Mother’s Day was not on my radar whatsoever. I never expected to be acknowledged, much less get a gift. It was more important to me that my stepdaughter honor her biological mother, with whom she is so close. With such low expectations, how could I possibly be disappointed? Since my stepdaughter’s outburst, my husband and I had given her some space. However, on Mother’s Day she wanted to come by. She gave me a card, and I started crying. She asked me why I was crying. When I told her it was because we had a rift a few months prior and I was glad to know we patched things up, she said, “Oh that?! That was nothing!” With a literal wave of her hand, any thought toward trauma in my own heart flitted off into the lonely, invisible sphere of “who cares?”
My feelings were not on her radar. I’m a “freezer;” in that moment, I froze. I would freeze again, and again.
It was spring about 7 years later. I had experienced miscarriage number 3. It had been particularly painful, worse than any before. It was to be my last. Menopause was around the corner. In an effort towards transparency, my husband and I called my stepdaughter to share with her that I was no longer pregnant.
About a month later, on a gloriously sunny day, cheering from the bleachers at my step-grandson’s baseball game, somewhere between excitement for the game and the stark edge of reality, I sat on the cusp of falling headlong into being disillusioned.
The “perfect family” dream dies hard. Mine was about to implode.
Babysitting my step-grandson brought me joy and us closer, so after the game, he came home with me for the night. Out of character, he asked pointed questions during what turned out to be the last time he spent the night with us. Personal questions. They struck me as odd for a child his age, but I answered them honestly.
The next afternoon, I dropped him off at his mother’s, and 5 minutes later, my phone rang. No one has ever spoken to me with such vitriol. Her formative years produced a strong, bullying tendency that found it’s way to me, in my car, killing the glow I basked in from what I thought was a special visit with my step-grandson. All those questions I found so curious? He was primed by his mother to ask them. My answers confirmed her warped suspicion that we rejected her, although I could not see the logic after years of pouring selflessly into the relationship (decades, in the case of my husband). I suggested she take her concerns up with her father.
Shocked and feeling thoroughly battered, I had to pull over on the side of the highway. She had never been a sensitive person, but this was a new level of hatred.
When I got home, he called her. However it was during the Altanta Braves game, and she couldn’t be bothered. She called him back, and he asked her what was wrong. In a sweet voice from an adoring daughter to her loving father, she said nothing was wrong but she would like to see him spend more time with her son. With a promise to do so, they ended the call on peaceful, loving terms. Her complaint to me was against him, his decisions, his lack of time with her child, but he was not to experience the cruel attack I experienced.
I cried for two days straight through.
Try to understand. My parents didn’t fight. There was no drama in the home I was raised in. I have no framework to respond to this. When my heart shattered into a thousand pieces at being her punching bag, so did the illusion. Some would even say she did me a favor.
Being a person of faith, I prayed. What did I do wrong? How did I contribute to this problem? Here’s what I heard: “You forced normal.”
Yes, yes I did! Out of love, I forced my version of normal. This is not safe, not healthy, not sustainable. Not love in it’s purest form.
Scouring the internet for any advice on step parenting adult step-kids, I quickly realized there is a dearth of information in this area. Changing direction from blogs or articles to books, the best resource I found was “Stepmonster.” This book helped me know I wasn’t going crazy and that my heartbreaking experience was, in fact, normal for stepmoms.
From there, I followed my husband’s lead and put distance between my stepdaughter and myself, waiting for her to come to us to connect. I was no longer forcing anything.
A few years after this, I offered to take my stepdaughter to lunch for her birthday. We met at a restaurant, where she ordered a steak, and told me that she was going to fire an employee. The offense? The employee was “weird” because the employee didn’t have any children. Scrunching her nose, she followed that judgement by saying they were not a good worker. The message that made it through to my heart from her lips is that I’m fired as a stepmom because I’m weird, I don’t have children and I don’t do enough.
In this season, once a measure of healing has taken place, I began to invest in myself. I found my tribe online, and even connected with a few in person. I attended a stepmom retreat for two years, until the pandemic caused it to be canceled. I became a co-administrator for a Christian infertility support group. I poured myself into my own family, whom I’d neglected while trying to create an illusion of normal. I began to exercise more regularly and eat far healthier than I ever had. I organized and went on several girlfriend getaways.
I came full circle: I spent my attention and energies on the people who had my best interest at heart.
Holidays and birthdays became more balanced, both with our time and our presents. The first Christmas after her latest outburst, she sat next to me, very much in my space, and raised her voice when speaking to me, effectively yelling in my ear. I skipped the next Christmas. The following Christmas, she had gone through every gift we brought and when we failed to produce a gift for someone, she said loudly 3 times in a living room full of her family while looking right at me, “You didn’t bring a gift for so-and-so!” Christmas’ are extremely hard, even as the grandson ages and hopefully the adults continue to mature. It seems her Dad and I can never do right, reinforced by two letters she has written her father that he doesn’t love her enough.
It has been an excruciating journey. For each of us.
Where are we today? Going on almost 10 years since that fateful day when she spewed hate with such force in my ear, I would love to tell you that we are all healed and get along swimmingly. The reality is that there exists both a measure of trust and distrust, love and… something else between respect and tolerance. There are not that many years between us, so it’s not an age gap issue. I am not her biological Mom, and the man she considers her father has chosen me, not her biological Mom. This hurts her heart. The best I can do is to accept and love her to the best of my ability without expecting anything in return and without putting pressure on her.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash