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Strollerderby
The discipline of parenting.
It was just over five years ago that I proposed to a single mom. That, of course, means that just over five years ago, I was shaking in my boots at the prospect of becoming a stepdad. And I’d be lying if I told you that the transition was smooth. It was incredibly difficult to go from carefree bachelor to (virtually) full-time dad overnight.
It was as if a thief in the night came and took all my free time away. While I had plenty of time for doing whatever I wanted, suddenly, thanks to my stepdaughter, most of my waking moments were spoken for. Not that that was a bad thing. For it wasn’t. But it did take some getting used to. Then, five months into our marriage we learned that we were expecting triplets and I fretted beyond belief. After all, if one was hard to get used to, what in the world would I have to do to get used to three more? At once?
How will you spend your spring break?
Spring break conjures up images of bikini-clad students doing body shots far from their parents watchful eyes.
At my house, though, it’s family time. My stepson lives most of the year in Colorado with his mom, and spring break is one of the few times he’s at home with us.
It wasn’t always like this. He spent half of his time with us for most of his childhood. The situation changed a few years ago when his mom moved to Colorado and we agreed that he’d live with her during the school year and see us on vacations.
Suddenly, we became the vacation parents. And spring break became family time, not party time.
The little girl who let me marry my wife holds her triplet siblings in December of 2007.
In August of 2006, I married my beautiful Caroline. Together, alongside her 5-year-old daughter, we entered the complicated world of blended families. But in February of 2007, we learned that our world would become more complicated still, thanks to some shocking news: My wife was pregnant with triplets.
There were many different types of concerns throughout Caroline’s pregnancy. Some were logistical — we’d need a bigger house and car. Others were physical — Caroline has a very small frame, and she was 38 at the time. And many were emotional. A series of serious complications made for nine months of pretty constant anxiety, but perhaps our biggest worry was for Alli.
How would she fare during yet another transition? She had already endured a tremendous amount of change in her short life — her parents’ divorce, moving from her very first home to the one she shared with her mom, accepting me in theory during the engagement, and then accepting me in actuality after the marriage. And in a few short months, Alli would go from being the center of the universe to the oldest of four in the blink of an eye. So much change would be hard on anyone, let alone a 5-year-old girl.
My dorky blended family.
Have you ever noticed that the older we parents get, the less cool we become? It’s true. Ask your kids. They’ll tell you. It used to bother me, but now that I’m onto it, I’ve come to accept it.
But what I didn’t realize was how uncool my family has become—my blended family, that is. Turns out we’re super lame. Nowhere near as hip and edgy as other blended families.
Blue-tongued Alli goofing off at the beach last August.
Although we had gone to school together from 1980 to 1987, I hadn’t laid eyes on Caroline for nearly a decade. That is before I randomly bumped into her in 2004. Truth be known, I had always found her extremely attractive, even during the Carter administration when she was nothing more than a feisty little 6th grader equipped with the perfect blend of beauty and sass. And the all-grown-up version was somehow even more beautiful than I had remembered.
But in spite of our immediate chemistry, I knew a long-term relationship wasn’t in the cards.
I love my stepson. He was the first kid to call me, “Mom,” in an embarassing moment that made us both blush and stammer and turn away. He was about 9 at the time, and I’d been in his life for a year or so. We were loading our bikes in the car and he shouted, “Hey, Mom, can you grab my helmet?”
He didn’t mean me. He meant his real mom, who wasn’t there. I was, and I grabbed his bike helmet and threw it quickly in the car.
A year later, my new husband and I had a baby, who grew up to call me mom and really mean it. But I’ve never forgotten that moment. The boy in question is 16 now, and calls me by my first name. We play board games and share music collections and get into fierce late night conversations about our favorite TV shows and world politics and everything in between.
He’s a kid in my family, and in some sense my kid, is what I’m trying to say. I love him.
Apparently, my love for my stepson is a pretty rare gift. Salon offers up an essay today on the legions of guilty stepmoms who loathe, or at best politely tolerate, the little monsters their husbands brought into the household by way of a previous marriage.
Literature and pop culture are rife with examples of Wicked Stepmothers, those unloving brutes who force their stepchildren to do impossible chores while coddling their own spoiled brats.
Motherlode offers us a glimpse of the other side of that coin with a letter from a desperate stepmom, who has four stepchildren and three little kids of her own. She wrote in saying:
I need help. I’m married. I have 4 step-kids. I dislike two of them…I just don’t get why I feel this way. I also feel trapped. I feel 50 and I’m 25. I want to feel young again.
Ouch. Continue reading »
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