The Story of Her

When my friends told my now-fiancé that I wasn’t always so contentious, so careful, he was surprised.  After all, he met me in graduate school, when I was twenty-four and already a stepmom.  A few years prior, he would have met a different person who lived with more immediacy and took things less to heart.  Those years between collage and finishing graduate school were transformative in many ways, but most of all because of her.

The story of my ex is less relevant to this story, and not very compelling.  After living abroad, I moved back to the US and was hired a sportswear company where I enjoyed being the only girl, and fit in well with the work hard, play hard culture.  We worked long hours, drank freely, and only two of us were single, so our relationship began as more of a statistical probability than a true romance.

From the beginning, though, it was all about her.  The custody handoffs between him and his ex frequently took place at the office, so their four-year-old daughter was often there, strutting around, all sass and tiny denim skirts and swishing dark hair.  Even with the immature, addled brain of a 23-year-old, I remember thinking, for the sake of this tiny, lovely person let’s try to get this right.

Dating someone with a child is a spectacularly humbling gig.  Already loving the child’s parent, you may feel a bond and sense of affinity towards the child, but there is no guarantee they will reciprocate.  Adults have the cognizance to hide their angst from failed relationships, but a child’s negative experiences with their parent’s divorce or earlier partners will be projected directly onto you.

Her dad had just gotten out of a long-term, live-in relationship, and for the first six months she literally didn’t speak to me.  I spoke to her a lot; we had entire one-sided conversations about songs, what the three of us were going to do that day, and what was for lunch.  I bought her new outfits, learned all the words to the three High School Musical movies and the pantheon of Taylor Swift songs, and finished her leftover chicken nuggets.  

Eventually she came around. The upside of being a stepparent is that if the child ends up liking you, it’s a hard-won privilege.  The adult may have oxycontin running in their veins facilitating bonding, but you really have to earn a child’s trust.  That makes it even more rewarding if you do.  Smiles and acknowledgement were like tiny ribbons of success, and the first “I love you” card she made me was like a little piece of alchemy. 

Having never established a real adult routine, I quickly adopted theirs, and after a hectic early-twenties, I loved the predictability and structure of a suburban family existence.  I loved it so much that I ignored a series of red flags about my relationship with her dad and instead implicated myself further in their life.  

About a year into our relationship, the start-up folded and we found ourselves jobless.  To save money, I gave up my apartment and moved into his townhouse.  I found a new job, started graduate school, and worked myself senseless to provide for my newfound dependant.  In the evenings I fixed her carrots and apple slices, played board games, and made endless crafts.  Strangers sometimes mistook me for her real parent as I gave her a ski lesson, piggy-backed her through a fun-run, or studied for grad school exams while waiting in line to see Santa, and while she already had a great mom, deep down I felt grateful for their validation of the motherly role I was trying to play.

There is a dark side.  Regardless of how deeply you love the child, your views on parenting and discipline will always be subverted and your access to the child is wholly dependent on the biological parent.  Cracks appeared in his carefully honed mask of integrity.  Our parenting views differed on everything from money to nutrition to discipline, which became more evident as she grew older and required more of each.  Eventually his duplicity reached a tipping point where I was faced with dual imperatives: stay out of love and duty to his child, or save myself. 

After months of reckoning and full of guilt, I chose the latter.  He reciprocated by cutting off my access to her entirely.  After three years, it had all evaporated.  The grief was stunning, like someone had removed my lungs and replaced them with gills.  It’s a lonely, conflicting experience, because though logically you know you have no claim to the child, your body and your heart never quite catch up.

Three years on, he hasn’t changed, but by all accounts she is doing fine.  Like a particularly potent drug, grief has an awfully long half-life.  I still have every card and piece of artwork she ever made me, and when I see her out with her dad at gatherings of mutual friends, I tear up but don’t fall to pieces.  I put my lessons learned in my back pocket for next time— I know I am capable of that kind of love, tenderness, and responsibility, and I know what kind of parent I want to be.  As for her, it can’t hurt to have one more person in the world that loves her indefinitely from afar.