After the divorce, Girl wanted to feel desirable again. She asked Stepmother to draw her. She didn’t have money to pay someone to draw or paint her, and she really wanted a picture of herself, to reclaim her body as her own, not just as a producer of children. Stepmother was a decent artist, and she always did nudes. Girl lay naked on her parents’ bed as Stepmother sketched her. Maybe this was how Girl said she was sorry for objecting to Stepmother’s blurred boundaries. Maybe she just wanted free art. Stepmother sketched her in charcoal, looking at her like an artist, not as a lecherous man. In the end, Girl didn’t like how puffy Stepmother made her pubic hair, or how fat her stomach looked. When friends asked her how she could let Stepmother see her naked again, she didn’t have an answer.
Girl, her children, and her parents went swimming in the pond, and Girl pulled leeches off the backs of Stepmother’s veiny calves. Stepmother became the one Girl talked to about dating, and sex, and newfound feminine power. For once, that blur between parent and peer, male and female, was something to cherish. It was the closest to Stepmother she had ever been, and when Girl called her parents, she spent nearly as long talking to Stepmother as she did to Mother.
When Girl was asked out for her first date, it was Stepmother who volunteered to watch the children.
“But they’ve never been put to bed by anyone but me for their entire lives!” Girl objected.
“I can handle it. I’ll read them stories. I’ll even lay down with them if they need me to. If they can’t sleep, I’ll just stay up with them.” And so Girl went out to dinner with a man who wrote books and was the kind of person she was sure she would find, if only she went looking.
Stepmother had infinite patience with Girl’s children. Girl and her boys drove to her parents’ house every weekend, and Stepmother read books and played games and was never short-tempered. She was like an entirely new version of herself, and these new memories ran into the cracks of Girl’s bitterness, dissolving it like rain on hard ground. And Stepmother and Mother sang songs to each other and danced in the kitchen.
“I want to do an adult adoption,” Stepmother said. “When I die, I want you and Brother to inherit everything. I worry that my sister will challenge my will as my only living relative.”
Girl knew the inheritance was merely a carrot at the end of a pole, meant to lead Girl where Stepmother wanted, but she understood that underneath her words of tax law and estate planning, Stepmother wanted legitimacy in Girl’s life. She wanted to be recognized as the parent she had always been—flawed, certainly, but relentless in showing up. Girl researched adult adoptions, and learned that she would not have to forsake her father.
“Okay,” she told Stepmother. “You can adopt me.” Surprisingly, Brother agreed to be adopted as well. A lawyer was retained, and Stepmother changed her residency from Florida, which had no state income tax, to New York, which did, but also recognized adult adoptions. Then Stepmother met Deb, and everything changed.
notes from the fourth wall
i used to believe, now i know
I used to believe that my mother was complicit in everything that went wrong in my life. I knew that she wasn’t particularly interested in raising children. I never listened to her protestations that she had wanted my brother and me very badly and loved us very much. She always loved Pat, her chosen spouse, more than she loved me. Pat would never grow up and move out. Pat would never leave her. She could mother Pat longer than she could mother us. It was a fight I could never win, but I could certainly resent the struggle.
Pat came first, her career came second, and my brother and I fought like cats and dogs for a distant third place. She rarely made cookies or took us to the beach and only half-listened when we talked. I would try so hard to get her attention, saying outrageous things to make sure she was listening; like that I had gone to Europe or had a frontal lobotomy. “That’s nice,” she’d reply, inciting me to rage while I washed the dinner dishes by hand in our old, stained sink. The fact that she took time out of her day to sit and talk to me while I was washing dishes was lost on me.
I did not understand why she would bother having kids if she didn’t want to spend time with them. I desperately wanted my mother to stay at home and bake me cookies and play with me and be the room mother in my class at school. Me, me, my mother, look at me. I swore to myself that if I ever had children, I would raise them right. We had lived in a trailer so my mom could go to college. My mother said that after all that struggle and poverty and sleepless nights she wasn’t going to drop her career to stay home, even though Pat wanted her to. My mother said that we couldn’t afford to live in a house if she didn’t work, that we’d have to live in an apartment in the city. I would look at her accusingly and tell her fiercely that I would rather live in an apartment and have her stay home. She didn’t tell me of her fear of gangs in the only neighborhood that would have been cheaper than where our tiny house was, or that high-density communities like apartment complexes have more exposure to more people, some
