A Joyful Place Called Home

Archive for the ‘Creating Family Traditions’ Category

The stepmother often has the ineviable job of being the person who actually makes sure the dreams and desires come together for a child, but the reality of not being appreciated for the effort. Prom was such a time. While we were happy that he was happy to be going, we asked what he needed help with and forsaw some things he didn’t realize he would need help with. We did the transport for fittings, reservations, pictures and helped make sure the details happened when he forgot or didn’t know to see about them. We were thrilled to see him prepare and dress that night, yet he wanted us to have no part of his evening. While he dressed and showed off his outfit for his stepbrother, he carefully didn’t come to where I was, and he preferred I didn’t come to where he was. We held him down long enough to get before pictures for his natural mom, to take him to where they were gathering and his dad stayed long enough to get couple pictures as did the other parents.
After his departure, I emailed his mom with the pictures his father took and posted them on his myspace as requested. We waited up for him and made sure he had rides home. Upon arrival home we happily asked about the details of the night. Again this morning we asked….receiving a 3 minute blunt, emotionless running statement about the order of where they went. No adjectives, no details. But I watch him now, sitting on my deck, legs kicked up, talking through every detail and reliving it all for his mom. The real one. The smile on his face and the expressionate descriptions indeed say he had a good time.
The thing six years has taught me is, this isn’t personal. To him. This, to him, is loyalty to the woman who birthed him, who in his opinion has no responsibility in the choices a judge made that said she couldn’t raise him. This choice happened long before his dad even met me….so its not my doings. In fact, I’m the one who makes sure that he calls, gets back for holidays and works to make sure “Mom” has birthday presents, Mother’s day and Christmas from him….usually from my pocket not his.
For me though, its a regular war to keep down the very fleshy, personally taking it side of me when I day in day out go two extra miles for him and rarely if ever hear a thank you. This is not about step or natural….my natural guys say thank you, so its said regularly in this house, but son1 feels the things I do and work hard to do are simply required…..after all I am somehow in his mind the one who keeps him from his mom. Never mind I came 6 years after she left. You have to know that I am the only full time adult that has been with him since he was 11…even his dad has been gone on deployments several times during this time. The one who stays up late with him in illness, celebrates him in gladness and works with him when school was hard. He spends six to ten days with her a year by her choice, however he only considers the place she lives home. Ever.
Its just the way it is for a stepmother…..and its not about how hard you try or even sometimes how much you love them.
And so, today I smile that though I am not a part of his night last night and he didn’t wish to share it with us, I know that if Dh and I had not put in the effort we did, this night would not have happened….and it is enough. I am simply glad he had a wonderful time.

I remember it well…..the day my husband said “that’s it, we’ll face bankruptcy or what have you but for now we need you at home taking care of your mother and our children” …and I thought he meant financial bankruptcy..
Somehow it never occured to me to come home. I enjoyed teaching, training, facilitating though my personality and lack of organizational skills made it an infinite challenge at times….to those of us who do not deal in details gradebooks can be a true challenge….however the actual teaching I loved and the interaction with the students as they developed.
Coming home at first wasn’t much different for me, it was still a hurried, frenzied pace of strive to cover it all with mom dying in a town 20 miles from me and with children at home and going to bed exhausted. Stresses with principals had changed to the stress of watching one’s mother die up close and personal….with someone who woud not allow alot of personal involvement in the process. My mother was an amazing woman, even in death, but moreover she was a private woman, even in death. Almost three years have passed from that experience, yet those months are pristinely crisp in my mind….weeks of moments where I thought we’d share something of her dying, but realizing later she didn’t wish to….and simply taking care of what had to be done without interfering with her desire to live life as usual until she didn’t.
About the time I recovered from the blow of her death, my husband left for Iraq for a half year. As a stepmom/mom of four I had my hands full, add to that a 17 miles commute to one of their schools and now homeschooling another, it was a full year. I learned more about life outside the classroom and working world, though I worked about six jobs to make up for the one paycheck I was no longer earning. However paychecks of the heart were indeed being paid as I grew closer to the children, they could rely more upon me for comfort things such as cookies and time alone on bad days, that before I could not have been there for since I was still at school.
The next year brought so many changes with Mom gone, my Dad and I had a peculiar rebirth in our relationship. A retired physician, a strong thinker, I was perhaps the convenient choice of companion, and I tried to be helpful and yet allow him to grow into independence at home. He grew indeed and added a new wife by the end of the year. …which sent me to home again more full time, except when, of course both of them needed something.
Money was always a precarious thing as we learned to deal with one income. We managed to pay off most of what we owed the first two years and dh even managed to buy a truck on year three….his first new one ever. By year three step parenting was beginning to fall out of the category for scariest thing ever back to this is now the norm…..a new norm that involved daily at least one stepchild having complete disregard for you if not outright resentment over your presence in his life….yet emotionally so needy that you had to love him for he so needed to be loved.
Year five brought another trip to a foreign country for dear husband. Dh was in Kuwait and I was in the foreign world of boys in high school participating in ball and band. That meant three nights a week somewhere between the other two nights a week in church…and two to recover and wash everything they dirtied. Oh My Gosh. The times were good and hard and everything in between. We took them and viewed them much as a girls group follows a band…squealing and ahhhing at their achievements. Getting up early the next morning to homeschool our then fourth grader…it was indeed a foreign place for me…
This year we’ve moved to a new territory….a new state some 8 hours from our last home, leaving the rural home for a city urban one and finding out that indeed it is very expensive to live in the city. The mortgage isn’t the issue, its the cost of literally eating…..and then the assumptions that city kids have that they must “do” weekly….movies….time out with friends….dinners out….that our children won’t be doing….or at least not often….its a simple equation. We cannot afford it. One is old enough to work and earn his way, unfortunately he cannot over his school schedule if he is to graduate, the other not old enough to do it. The littlest one in reverie that there are girls on the same street to bike, befriend and enjoy.
Coming home……three years into it now, heading into my fourth…..what I am fighting is not financial bankruptcy, but bankruptcy of my goals, my dreams, my desires for adult life……or am I? Has it all been pushed aside or has it simply somehow been realigned as to what it is I want now….who I am now.
That is the focus for me this week, this year…..redefining what I view success as….what I define as meaningful existence…..who and what of my past I will choose to be loyal to….who I will choose to continue reaching out to and be a part of their lives…..what I will define as enjoyable…..reasonable….required……or what will be set aside as no longer a part of my personal pictorial of musts in life.

Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
Proverbs 4:22-24