Non-Breeder: The Reluctant Stepmother
Learning to play house.
by Lisa Selin Davis
April 9, 2007
Eight years after he'd dumped me, I ran into an ex in a Barnes and Noble foyer. Since then, I'd been through six failed relationships and three therapists. I was busy being alone (yoga, salad, primetime television). I didn't recognize him at first. Still handsome, but his beard had gone gray and the circles beneath his blue eyes darkened. He said he'd gotten married ("Congrats," I said); had a daughter ("She's beautiful," I said about her wallet-sized photograph); and gotten divorced. Then he asked for my number.
No way, I thought. I'll never go out with him again.
Three weeks later, I was meeting his two-year-old at the Tot Lot in Prospect Park. I was lying when I'd said she looked beautiful in the photograph — I'd actually thought she looked a little homely. In real life, she was beautiful. Her mom was Japanese, but Kim had pale skin and reddish hair and eyes like green agate. She looked up at me from the sandbox as if I were a monster. "She can probably sense your nervousness," Rich said.
She wanted to swing, which she communicated with a combination of hand gestures and noises I couldn't interpret, but Rich nodded at me and I bent to lift her. She ran the other way. The best part of the afternoon came when she fell asleep in the stroller, and I could smooch Rich all I wanted. Our doomed fate was certain. I gave us another week before we split.
A year later, they moved in, Kim with us three-and-a-half days a week. We kid-proofed my living room. My sisteSometimes, I thought stepmothering included all the parenting unpleasantness without the rewards.r-in-law painted a mural of a unicorn on Kim's wall. Rich worked funny film industry hours, and I was thrust into an amorphous caretaker role, picking Kim up at school, cobbling together her dinner. Her mother prescribed the traditionally over-scheduled Manhattan childhood: expensive, exclusive preschool, ballet, Japanese school, swimming lessons. At times, I was a volunteer chaperone, though I secretly loved riding the subway with Kim, to think others would see her in some part as my achievement. At school, during craft time, when the teacher asked her what she wanted to write on her construction paper heart, she dictated, "I love Daddy and I love Lisa."
I was determined not to reenact either of my childhood step-parenting models: my overbearing stepmother whose relentless attempts to win our affections allowed my father to retreat to a comfortable place of intoxicated indifference, and my distant stepfather, who withdrew in response to our stepmom complaints. But sometimes, I thought stepmothering included all the parenting unpleasantness without the rewards: wiping drool, washing clothes, changing diapers, without seeing the fruit of my own loins bloom. I have always wanted to see how my own kids turned out, with the Davis musical genes, sense of humor — to tell them the funny stuff in my head and see what they do with it.
Love for Kim grew inside me, but it grew slowly, like a shade plant. I didn't feel like sharing my bottled water with her (and introduced her to the word backwash, by way of explanation), or mopping up her vomit when she got carsick. If I got angry, grabbed her wrist, sent her for a time out when Daddy wasn't there, guilt drowned me.
"Be like a really fun aunt," my friends suggested; most hadn't yet procreated and none had entered this virgin territory. Fun aunt didn't work. The fun aunt doesn't live with the kid. I was at least partially a caretaker, a disciplinarian. It wasn't about fun; it was about doing what was best for the kid.
©2007 Lisa Selin Davis and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of the novel Belly (Little Brown) and a freelance journalist. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Interior Design, New York and This Old House. |
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