On hating your stepdaughter

And loving your stepdaughter.  

I have a stepdaughter. I have been her stepmother for 10 years. I met her when she was a young girl. Now she is a serious Lolita. One might say we have a serious history together or that we have grown up together. Which we have ,yet I have never asked to be her mother. I have heard of other women who were desperate to be liked by their step kids. Or felt some innate female longing to be a mother and took on that project with a zealous determination. I felt none of that. And still don’t. This child of my husband has annoyed me like no other being ever has. She gets on my nerves with her bratty attitude, her jaded worldview and her spoiled way of reacting to her surroundings. She questions why she has to accept our horrible art (which is stunning according to me) and why I sometimes drink wine for lunch (which most every sophisticated European did when I grew up…) Or why I let her father behave so horribly to me (and I am thinking but you are acting horribly to me?) and then makes sure to be mean to her younger sisters. My children. As if I would let that one slide…

And yet she loves me so deeply because I treat her fairly and consistently, regardless of her teenage antics. And she loves me so naively because she is a child after all and she longs for unconditional love with all of the cells of her being. And in the depth of her soul she knows that I have her best interest at heart.

And that is the problem. Her heart. And my heart. As much as I hate her, I also love her. Without knowing why and with no prior training, I got into her head and saw the world from her eyes. Very early on. What it must be like when your parents (that represent your whole world) split up when you’re so very young and then just fight. Day in and day out. In front of you, when you’re supposedly sleeping. And then in court for years and years. And your heart is breaking because you love both of them and want to be held and cradled and understood and loved. And then your daddy meets somebody who could love you. Even though you’re not looking for a new mom because you already have one. Just some maternal cradling and understanding. And I fit that role. But her heart was so hurt that she was bratty or jealous or simply complained most of the time. And I fumed. Inside and sometimes directly at her. I had to be the teacher at all times. Both to her and to her father. And then the Judge. Between her and I. Between her father and her. And between my young girls and her. And then I fumed even more.

Now we all live together and I see her all the time. So I hear her bratty, jealous complaining mode of being. All of the time. She even had the audacity to voice her opinion about my wish to have a horse. She made it clear that I could not just get a horse. Her father got a car of his choice. And another one. And then a boat. Just because he wanted. It. But for me to get a horse? Oh no, that was simply not ok by her.  So I lost my cookies in all visible ways known to our whole family. Who witnessed it all. We all agreed that she was wrong and I was right. I had the right to get a horse! Ok, I, the grownup, was vindicated and the angry moody teenager was wrong. There. Justice served. But then that heart. That tugs at me time and again. So I sat down with her the next day and I asked her. Why would you deny me my passion (in getting a horse) when I have given you everything that you dream of? Why would you not want me to be happy and free but rather pretend that you have some sort of power to ban me from doing what I dream of? Or even worse, try to enlist your father to ban me from living my life happily and freely and to my heart’s desire? And she looked at me straight in the eyes and whimpered, “because I don’t want to lose you. You don’t have enough time as it is with daddy, your work and all of us kids. And if you get a horse, you’d leave us for the stable.” And just like that, I love her. Again and again.

As I see that young girl’s heart that has been broken a million times in her 14 years, I understand that she just wants it to heal. With somebody. That heart has decided that my heart is the one to align with. And as much as she upsets every cell in my body many times of the day, she also makes it feel just right.

Because love is the freedom to go and the choice to come back. Sometimes love is holding off on getting a horse so you can stick around to see your kids grow up. All of them. Even your stepdaughter.

And the funny part is that her heart is the one that needs the mending yet my heart is the one that is doing the growing on a daily basis. My heart will never leave her heart. She still tests it all the time though, with her bratty, spoiled complaining way, to make sure that this is really the case. That I will not sneak out and buy a horse and take off to a stable without her knowledge. And this still drives me crazy and tests my motherly limits. We joke about that every now and then. We agree that that’s that. That her and I are on this journey called modern day divorced life together and it’s tricky and slippery and wild. But most importantly, it's real and it's us. We've forged our own path and created our own version of mother-daughter duo. And then we both smile and know innately that we are family.

I smile because I know that regardless of our biological connection, I will always love her as one of my own. She probably smiles because she’s counting down the days till she has a Driver’s License and that stable threat is as old as yesterday’s TikTok.