What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (31 page)

To be fair, I wasn’t much smoother. Sure, I was apparently intimidating him with my ease at drink-ordering (dads don’t get to bars that often), but the first time I saw his apartment, and, specifically, the two little blue twin beds that belonged to his sons, I was out the door in less than five minutes. The sites and smells and
reality
of two little boys were overwhelming.

But then one day, after a few weeks of nervous circling and running out of doors, Rob took me sailing, and we talked about how scared we were of each other. I asked him what he thought we should do about it. His suggestion was immediate:

“I think you should sleep over.”

I laughed. “Really. Like, just sleep?”

“Yes. You should just come over to my house, and stay there all night, and then we’ll be used to each other and not so scared.”

“So, sleep over, like, PG-style? Just jammies, movies, nothing scary, like that?”

“Yes, exactly,” he lied.

I slept over. It was PG for exactly four minutes. But it worked. Very slowly, we started to grow ever so less afraid. Rob climbed Kilimanjaro with his brother later that month, and the advice from the porters on how to get to the top was a Swahili term,
polepole.
It basically means to go slowly and softly, one step at a time. Take it easy. When Rob heard the advice on that mountain in Tanzania, he thought of us. So
polepole
was our mantra.

And so that was what we were doing when my evil stepmother’s boob exploded.

Really. Apparently, she had noticed a lump in her breast nine months before the tumor ruptured. She didn’t tell anyone, even though her sister had come through stage three uterine cancer. She didn’t have a doctor look at it, even though she worked five days a week at a hospital. She just ignored it, like, apparently, an alarming percentage of people who know they have cancer do, until, one day, in front of my dad and all of their children, the tumor grew so large that it ruptured and her breast literally burst.

They rushed her to the hospital. They did the things they do to people with breast cancer. They learned the cancer had spread to her lungs and lymph nodes. The wound from the rupture in her breast would never fully heal, and the tumor was inoperable.

And ten years into our amicable peace, I hated her again. This might not have been the kindest reaction, but a mother of four children, one of them only eleven years old,
ignored
her grapefruit-size tumor. Her horrible judgment was going to actually kill her, and to deprive the children that I loved of their mother. The
one thing
this woman had going for her, in my mind, was her youth. She would outlive my father. She’d take care of him, and take care of the kids of an elderly man. But now she wasn’t even going to do that. My rage was back, all the old evil stepmother wounds freshly opened and salted.

And that’s exactly when I started dating a guy with two kids.

I
didn’t meet Rob’s sons for a long time. We wanted to be positive we were on a serious road before we involved them.
Polepole.
But we also waited because I had
very
particular rules that I thought would keep us from making the same mistakes my father had made introducing me to Patty.

First, I thought it was very important to roll out the news slowly. Because children of divorce have a
tremendous
amount of potentially terrible news to absorb, from “Mommy and Daddy are splitting up” all the way through to “Mommy and Daddy are dating, then marrying, and maybe then procreating.” In my case, my father had decided to deliver all of this terrible news in one fell swoop. “I have a lover named Patty, and we’re getting married because you’re about to get a new brother or sister!” was his play. I was in ninth grade, and furious, and I prayed to a God I did not necessarily believe in that she would lose the baby. And then, on my fourteenth birthday, I got the news that she did. And they called off the wedding for two more years.

Do what you will with that information. I’m still sorting it.

I did not want my boyfriend’s kids to summon deities to ruin my life, so I was not particularly calm. Rob, on the other hand, was very calm. He is not a child of divorce, and is also an eternal optimist. He was sure we’d all get along great!

This is, of course, why we are a good match. I am on constant alert to impending disaster, and he is constantly
certain that everything is going to be okay. We developed a shorthand for discussing this difference between us, which came from something I read once about anxiety. Basically, ancient man lived to procreate another day if he was on the lookout for things that might eat him, like a bear. So, mild anxiety that there might be a bear behind that tree keeps you ready so you can escape if there is indeed a bear behind the tree. An ancient man with no anxiety often became a delicious amuse-bouche.

So when I sense impending doom, and Rob seems relaxed and calm, I say:

“Dude, bear behind the tree!”

Often, there
is
a bear behind the tree, and he’s grateful I showed him, surprised that I even knew to look. Other times, he takes my hand, and makes me walk around the tree, and points out that there’s no bear after all, and I calm down. It’s a good combo.

We thus rolled out the new-girlfriend news at a snail’s pace. In my experience, there were a ton of starving grizzlies behind this tree. I didn’t love that the kids hadn’t gotten any “Daddy’s dating” news before the “Daddy has a girlfriend” news, and we briefly toyed with the idea of making up stories of bad dates for them to hear about for a couple of months. That had been my experience when my mom started dating, and, after hearing about enough guys breaking up with her for aerobics instructors, or having nervous breakdowns in Venezuela over another woman, I was rooting for her to find someone. But we ultimately decided that starting the whole shebang off with a lie seemed incorrect.

So he just told them about me. And they didn’t cry, and wail, and beg for Daddy to go back to Mommy. They asked to see my picture, and wanted to know how we met. They said they were glad to see their newly divorced father so happy, after such a sad year. They talked about wanting to do some activity they were good at when they met me, so they could impress me.

Basically, they made me feel like an asshole. I was a terrible child.

M
eanwhile, my stepmother got sicker and sicker, not responding to any of the treatments. I threw an over-the-top Christmas, with a shopping spree designed to cure cancer. Instead it just cured a lack of cashmere shawls, and scarves for balding heads.

Meanwhile, Rob and I carefully planned the kidmeeting. We handpicked activities—nothing the boys would feel insecure doing, a combination of hangout time and playtime, and then, so we could just get used to being around each other without having to talk, we’d go see a show. We settled on the Cirque du Soleil show at the Santa Monica pier, realizing later that we had fallen into the perfect stereotype—Daddy was introducing his kids to his new girlfriend by taking them to the circus. I had images of two weeping children, holding a balloon and a cotton candy and a huge stuffed bear that in no way made up for their broken home.

To avoid this, we had a set of rules, also based on things I hated as a child with dating parents. We would not touch
each other in front of them. We would let the kids choose which of us they would sit by at the show. At the end of the night, Rob would not walk me out to the car. I didn’t want them to wonder what he was doing down in the garage with me. I wanted them to feel like I was leaving him with them, like I was a visitor and they were the home team. I would only hug them good-bye if they hugged me. Again, a lot of worry.

My therapist says, “All tenderness comes from your first pain.” That is, all of those buttons that get pushed in your life, all of the things that bother you and worry you irrationally more than the same things bother other people, they all have to do with your first big heartbreak. I could access the feelings from those early years with my stepmother like they had happened yesterday, and I was terrified of making Rob’s kids feel any of them.

I met up with all of them at the beach on a sunny winter day a couple of months after they learned about me. (
Polepole!
) The oldest wanted me to see him surf, on a new board he had just bought himself. I walked across the sand, and spotted the three of them silhouetted against the sparkling ocean. One big man, two little ones. They were a flurry of happy movement, hugging, wrestling, playing. I started to laugh, and cry a little, all alone on the sand, and snapped pictures from a distance, a stepkid paparazza. Was this what my family looked like? After all of these years of looking at other happy families, was this one mine?

The kids ran up to me, and shook my hand. They answered my questions, and asked me questions, and I buried the nine-year-old in the sand. The twelve-year-old showed
me his scars, and I told him that, one day, girls will flirt by asking him to tell the stories of how he got them. He liked that, and vowed to make up some good stories. They were whip smart, and hilarious, and seemed completely happy and calm.

We cleaned up and then walked to the circus, stopping on the way at the playground rings on the beach, so they could show off their tricks. I did some tricks, too, giving myself a little whiplash, and a blood blister.
Like me!!!!
At the circus, the little one switched seats, and sat next to me. It took everything I had not to touch him—he had his father’s dreamy curls, and keeping my fingers out of them was an act of extreme willpower, reminding me of great first dates, where you’re trying to play it cool. At the end of the night, they hugged me good-bye. I was in love.

And, the next day, I got the review: the kids had made a new Wii avatar named Kristin. A little boy home run.

T
wo weeks after I met the kids who will make me a stepmother, my evil stepmother died. Now, this is the happily-ever-after in Disney films. The moment that is followed by song-and-dance numbers, where happy little people and all of the creatures of the forest flutter and celebrate, and the long-tormented princess gets her prince.
Ding-dong.

In real life, the princess, in the form of a thirty-eight-year-old, grudge-holding sitcom writer, found out via text from her eleven-year-old sister:

MY MOMMY PASSED AWAY

We learned that the tumor had been growing for years.
It took a long time for it to fill her breast, because it was a very large breast. At my stepmother’s funeral there were many mentions of how proud she was of the top half of her body. My stepsister, who stopped working and moved home to nurse her mother and take care of our littler siblings when her mother was diagnosed, said that her mom would often talk about her high school years in the Philippines, where she was “popular, because she was skinny with big boobs.” My nineteen-year-old sister talked about how confusing her mother could be on the subject, shouting, “Don’t let boys touch your boobs” at her whenever she left the house. Yet, when it came time to buy a prom dress, she would guide my sister to the dresses that were the lowest cut, with the advice, “Show more of your boobs, it’s sexier!”

In Greece, it is bad luck to compliment the beauty of a new baby, because there is a superstition that it will attract the negative attention of the Gods. So, like an actor is told to “break a leg,” new parents in Greece hear, “What an ugly baby!” That was what I was thinking about as I listened to Patty’s sisters and daughters talk about her obsession with the exact body part that ended up killing her.

I did not plan on speaking at my stepmother’s funeral. I thought I had nothing nice to say. I thought that everyone would see the truth: that my heart was breaking for my motherless little siblings, but that
I was not grieving.
Because maybe my father now had a chance for a fresh start from a woman he could not afford to divorce. Maybe he would even sober up now that he wasn’t in an unhappy marriage, and do yard work again, and get off the couch and engage in the world like he used to and be the kind
of father to my baby sister he had been to me before it all went so, so wrong. Maybe he would finally be
happy.
I was afraid everyone would see that even though Patty and I had, finally, exchanged “I love you”s, and I had prayed to the God I once invoked to hurt her to this time make her better, that
I wouldn’t miss her.