Stepping Read Free

fact, I think she ought to write me a thank-you note sometime before we both die. Why not? We’ve never spent five minutes talking with each other, and yet we’ve both influenced each other’s lives. Adelaide, do it: write me a thank-you note for all that I’ve done for your daughters.
    And I’ll write you one, too. For when all is said and done, I’m glad that Charlie married you so that your two daughters could be in this world. I’m glad you had children with Charlie. I’m glad I had stepchildren.
    And that’s saying a lot. I’ve come a long, hard way, thirteen years of bare feet on broken glass, to reach that point of view.
    Yet it is both more and less than that. With stepparenting, as with most daily life, trivial actions cause melodramatic reactions. I wish my stepdaughters were here with me now in Finland because often in the past we have had so much fun together, but at least once in my life I have quite thoroughly wished them dead, really dead, and if they were here now we might possibly not have any fun at all. We’ve gone through so many variations, Charlie’s daughters and I. Nothing is simple, nothing stays. Our relationship is never pure and clear and free.
    Perhaps it’s all because of me. Perhaps it all has something to do with the fact that originally I am a Methodist from Kansas. Undoubtedly people who were raised in New England or California handle it better, have more fun and less misery with divorce and stepping. Over the years I’ve collected stories from stepparents; I’ve listened to stepparents with full attention, hoping that their lives would cast some light on my own situation. I know one stepmother who calls her son a goddamned asshole to his face (he’s fifteen) and who won’t let him in her house, and she is clear and righteous and doesn’t fret or feel guilty about that. I know another couple who are friends with and regularly visit the wife’s former husband and his new wife, and the man’s children and the wife’s children are all close enough in age to play football or croquet on the lawn while the four grown-ups sit on the patio and gossip and drink. But I also know a woman whose ex-husbandhas married a young girl who locks the children in their rooms for hours when she gets angry, and hits them when she gets very angry, and I know another stepmother who simply goes off traveling by herself every summer when her husband’s children visit so that she won’t have to come in contact with them.
    In comparison it seems that I haven’t been such a bad stepmother after all, certainly not a wicked or evil one. Stepmothers have had such bad publicity; I always identified with Snow White or Cinderella instead of their stepmothers. I wasn’t prepared for the role; I didn’t choose it.
    And that is where I’m at now: this matter of choice. As a good female Methodist from Kansas, I was not trained in choosing for myself. As I look back at my life, it seems that I spent a lot of time accepting what drifted my way, making not-choosing a way of life. This leaves me oddly crippled and very irritable now that I’m at a point where I must make a choice. How did I get to be where I am? What am I going to be? What am I doing in Helsinki, for heaven’s sake, thinking of my stepchildren while my own children are out at the Park Auntie’s, catching colds in the Finnish drizzle? Is everyone’s life composed of such crazily disparate elements? I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I’ll fix myself some Maalva rose hip tea and stare out the window and think of the past. I feel I must know what kind of woman I’ve been in order to know what kind I am going to be.
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    I was born and raised in Kansas; that much is simple and easily understood and dispatched. I love my parents, they love me, we write and call each other often. Because they are so busy in their own professions now, they found it easy to let me go, but when I was a child they coddled me, took care that I led a