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?