And because I am not their mother, they find it easier to talk to me about subjects that are traditionally agony[17] for mothers and children to discuss—namely sex, their ambitions (or lack of them), clothes, drugs, disloyal friends. I can see them as the age they are, not—as mothers inevitably do—as babies. Every exchange with a real mother is loaded with expectation and the potential for hurt, but stepmothers aren’t plugged into their stepchildren’s nervous systems, so they are cushioned from the worst agonies.[18] (When one of my stepchildren goes to the dark side, I do not think: “Oh God, that’s because I didn’t potty train you early enough/didn’t breastfeed for long enough/took that stressful job in my second trimester.”)[19] And if one of them wants a piercing[20], I can discuss it objectively without a voice in my head screaming, “But you’re my baby!”
So much for the pros[21] of this special relationship. There are downsides, too. I get tired of round-the-clock giving (more tired than a regular mother, because I haven’t had the practice), but at the same time I feel sad when they thank me for small kindness that children should take for granted. It seems a shame that they are appalled[22] at the thought of being caught naked by me (or worse, me by them), though I guess that, past a certain age, that’s normal. And I am sometimes brought up sharp by the yawning gap between their life experience and mine.[23] I am not part of my stepchildren’s history—they are a gang[24] with their father and I am, if not the outsider, then the new member of the band. Our house is full of photographs of their lives before I came along, holidays I never went on, houses I never lived in, plus a couple of our wedding day, with all of us in a line, squinting[25] into the camera. But you know what—that’s exactly as it should be. We’re not rewriting history, we’re making it—and we’re doing a pretty good job so far.
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