Not the same thing

Over the summer I had a talk with my step daughter. It was something like: as you get older you start to make your own decisions... Your dad waited a long time to be able to spend this time with you... you never want to do anything that will hurt him.... blah, blah, blah. The talk was sparked by a comment she made when I told her I didn't want her watching 16 and Pregnant on MTV. "But," she protested, "it's going to help me know what to do, just in case I can't control myself and become pregnant while I'm a teenager." 11 years old folks.

This retort could have been a clever strategy to shut me up with the profundity of her adult logic, just to be able to get to watch the show she wanted. Which is equally insane, to me. I took it, at the time, to be her genuine rationale. Maybe that makes me the idiot.

I think few adults come across the opportunity to intervene on a child's screwed up thinking right at inception. So I attempted, thinking there was no way I could let that comment pass without saying anything, to have this talk with her. It ended with me saying "...and hey, I'm not your mother, so you can talk to me if you ever want to, and you won't get in trouble, and I'll be up front with you..."

"But you're like my mother," she said. "You're my step-mother."
"But I'm not your mother," I said, probably a little more venomously than was necessary. "It's not the same thing."

If you were my daughter, I thought, there are so many things that I would do differently. Too many things to count. I would have her in gymnastics, she would have her hair done, neat, clean clothes that fit. But more we would love each other because we would be mother and daughter.

This weekend, she spent almost the entire time in her room with the door closed. Playing video games, watching tv. On friday night, around 3 in the morning, my husband crept into our room, pulled the blankets off me, and slid my pajamas off. We were quiet, almost silent, but I asked him to pause for a minute while I went to use the bathroom. Just across the hall from our bedroom, my step daughter was kneeling on her floor, remote control in hand and eyes wide in the blue light of her tv. My mind flashed back to 30 seconds before, and the slapping sound that filled my room, and probably came through her half open door. Did she hear that? Did she hear the grunting? Did she wonder what the hell it was? Back in my bedroom, my husband was laying naked in our bed, eyes half closed.

"She's still awake!" I whispered.
"I know," he said sweetly. "You nervous?"
"It's 3 in the morning!" Was he crazy? "Just finish." The mood was gone, not from the possibility of his daughter listening in the other room, but from the thought that he allowed her to stay up until 3am playing video games. And that his only thought during that time, was about fucking.

Later in the afternoon, I heard the neighbor's kids playing outside, and I told her to get dressed and go out to play. Something she had never done in two years of bi-monthly weekend visits here. It was 3 in the afternoon, now, as she changed out of her pajamas, and emerged from her room for the first time all day.

"She's not going out there to play with a bunch of boys," my husband said. I didn't know if it was mostly boys out, I heard some shreiking so if it wasn't girls it was really young boys. Whatever the case was, she couldn't sit in her room for the entire weekend. He had to do something with her, if she wasn't going to play outside. And it had already been established that me taking her to do things was completely pointless and wasteful.

"You're just being a busy body," he said. And that hurt really bad.
"Fuck you."

No, I'm not her mother. She's not my daughter. I'm the one who cooks her dinners, buys her cloths, washes her laundry, draws her name on the wall in laundry soap so that it glows in black light, but anything else has nothing to do with me. All the work, all the drawbacks, none of the benefits. So what does that make us. Where do I fit in to all this?

Oh yeah? Really?

Last night, my husband arrived after picking her up around 8:30 or so. It's not like I was sitting around waiting for them to get home or anything, but I had been home all day. I took a sick day from work, and I had a little cabin fever. I usually get anxious to see my husband after an entire day of seclusion with no physical contact with the outside world.

The two of them came in in a flurry, and she pretty much b-lined to her room, shut the door, and turned her tv on. Did she say anything to me? I can't even remember. I didn't care though, or at least I was supposed to pretend not to. Is it melodramatic to say I felt like I wasn't there? Am I an attention whore?

I cooked dinner and set up her plate, and decided to have a little witty exchange at the door of her bedroom.

"Are you hungry?"
"A little."
"How hungry are you?"
"Ummm."
"Are you too hungry to skip dinner?"
"Ummmm."
"Did you have dinner?"
"We had spaghetti at program." (Whats program, who the fuck knows.)
"Was that dinner?"
"It was a snack"
"How hungry will you be if you don't have dinner tonight?"
"VERY."
"Well I have you dinner right here, you can come and eat."

Five minutes later, she was still in her room with her door shut, the steam from her plate fading. I asked her if she was going to come and eat or what. She said no, she wasn't hungry.

My husband told me that it took an hour and a half to pick her up because her mother refused to come to the door of her job, that he was almost going to leave town and leave her there. Apparently, the mother is upset because my husband didn't tell her that their daughters eye glasses were ready to be picked. He said he was going to pick them up himself. Something like that. Apparently none of it has anything to do with me.

So here we are, at the start of the weekend, and my step daughter hasn't come out of her bedroom yet. She doesn't want to talk to us? She really just wants to be in her room the whole time? She's not going to ask for food? To go out? Don't we have to get her something for halloween? I'm out of it. I've decided that I'm in, or I'm out. There's no in between for me. Which means, I'm not going to go out of my way to spend money and take care of someone else's kid, if I'm not getting anything out of it. Bitch, you say? Hell yeah, I say.

Halloween coming... Birthday coming... smh

I know I'm not crazy.

When I started dating my husband almost 11 years ago now, his daughter was probably not even a year old. I had envisioned him as being a good dad who dressed his baby, and fed her and changed the diapers and took her to the park. I didn't think about being his wife right away, and I really didn't even fathom being a step mother, but I was eager to know his kid and to be a part of that dynamic in his life.

I was blissfully in love, I wanted to be part of every dynamic in his life. Fast forward 8 years, and I never would have expected that in all that time, I would barely get to spend any time with his daughter whatsoever. However many court orders, nasty phone calls, missed dates, scheduled visitation hours, petitions and rules later, and somehow my husband's little girl grew up in the background with me kept well at bay.

So here I am now, with a pre-teen staying (intruding) part-time in my house (life/world), with me feeling like I only just recently finished my teens myself. And somehow I can't find that feeling that makes me feel like she belongs there. Nothing has prepared me for dealing with this.

And now, here comes halloween followed quickly by her birthday. Last year I made her costume from scratch, and then I spent $250 on her birthday dinner. I can be totally honest because this is my blog, and say it was not even close to worth it. Am I a wicked witch? Yes, by definition. But we'll see what we get this weekend when she comes for her twice-monthly visit.