Dropped Threads 2 (7 page)

I quit modelling and took on three or four part-time jobs—cocktailing in a comedy club, catering weddings, giving out chocolates in department stores. I wrote hundreds of pages, truth until I was sick of it. I began to mix and match, make collages of fiction and fact. Then, using a combo of the two, I started what would be my first novel, determined to be as honest, emotionally, as I knew how. My mother—eighteen years sober and likely figuring I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting a book published—gave me her blessing. Other than Mom, I didn’t give a damn what anyone thought now.

Then it happened. In the spring of 2000,
Going Down Swinging
was published. The media attention was beyond anything I’d expected, a barrage of television and radio, my picture in national and local newspapers and magazines. And I was afraid again. For me and my mother. No one knew where fact ended and fiction began, but still, I had told. And people would know that I’d lived through at least some of that world or I couldn’t have written it.

A woman walks into Chapters one day to browse and sees a novel on the New Fiction shelf. On the cover is a kitten in a martini glass, and she can’t help reaching out to it. The author’s name pulls her eyebrows together. It can’t be. She flips the book over. The child’s eyes she remembers look back at her now, thirty years later. She grabs hold of the shelf to keep from falling.

Later, a phone message: “Hi, my name is Karen. You might not remember me, but I used to know you when you were a little girl. Maybe three or four. My friend Marilyn used to call you Billie Badoodle. I was so happy to find you in the phone book. Every couple of years I would look, and this time you were there….”

By the weekend, Marilyn has driven up from Oregon, where she lives now as an artist. When Karen opens her door, the two of them stand and look at me, smiles almost broader than their faces can hold. I don’t know who is who any more. All I can remember is the sense of them, the gorgeous warmth I felt being near. They’re both in their mid-fifties now, but a wild-haired hippie chick still vibrates through each of them into my bones as I try to hug thirty years’ worth in those first few moments.

Soon we’re sitting eating cheese and croissants and slurping strong coffee at Karen’s heavy oak dining table, surrounded by simple but elegant art in a house bought through twenty years of selling real estate. She scratches the head of Rubio, the lanky Afghan sitting beside her chair, and tells me about the collie she got after I disappeared from their lives and how she named her Billie. I can feel tears coming, but I breathe through them and listen.

They tell me again how surreal this feels, like magic. Thirty years ago, when doctors told my mother she’d be dead by Christmas if she didn’t knock off the drinking, Karen and Marilyn had considered kidnapping me, for fear I’d end up rattling around that house on Fourth Avenue alone with Black Mike the same way my child’s mind imagined that plate rattled around his head. When I disappeared they called everywhere, social services, Catholic Family Services—no one knew anything, or if they did, they weren’t telling.

“I thought of you so often and how much I loved being with you,” I tell them, “but I remember being a brat sometimes, and I wasn’t sure if the feeling was mutual.”

“We couldn’t get enough of you.” And we laugh and hold hands tighter and get weepy, the hair on our arms prickling every so often at the shock of us, here like this again, smiling for real and feeling in love.

There is fabric art hanging from the ceiling of my apartment now, two long strips of silk, dark and light green, dropping separately and doubling back to twist round each other again. It’s called
Billie and Me
, a piece from Marilyn’s last gallery show.

It’s the irony of it that kills me—keeping my secrets all those years for fear of losing people, and it was the telling that found them.

One Step
                    Forward

Shirley A. Serviss

I was surprised and touched when my stepson’s mother invited me to pose for a family photograph at his Grade 12 graduation. I joined Greg, his mother and stepfather, his half sister—my daughter—and his father, from whom I was separated. It was a healing end to many years of acrimony.

“Will you step to one side, Shirley? You’re in Denise’s face,” the photographer requested. Greg’s mother and I began to laugh. “What else is new?” she quipped. “Let’s not even go there,” I responded.

I was in my early thirties and wanted desperately to have a child when I became involved with a separated, twice-married man with a two-year-old son. A man who loved his son enough to take on the role as primary caregiver seemed like good father material. I was seduced by his dedication: leaving work on time night after night to pick up his son from daycare and put a home-cooked meal on the table. I was seduced by a small, blond, blue-eyed boy climbing into bed between us in the mornings for “sandwich hugs.” I was seduced by an image of a stable family life, like the one I had known as a child, in contrast to my single life following a divorce from a childless open marriage.

Greg was four by the time I moved in with his father, into the house his mother had once lived in and to which she still had a key. Our bedroom was furnished with the suite my partner had given his second wife as a graduation present (as she was to remind us later); our china and crystal was his half of the settings they had chosen when first married. Our chesterfield suite had been chosen by his first wife—a woman I never met, but who contributed more baggage than merely the beige loveseats that managed to outlast all three of his marriages. My partner always claimed these possessions were too expensive to replace; they were costly, indeed.

The symbolism of the house, the furniture, the crystal and china would not strike me until much later. My immediate concern was the preschooler who lived with us more than half the time and whose care had suddenly become my responsibility. When I dropped Greg at his daycare on the way to my office, he would dash in ahead of me and slam the door in my face. Suspecting the problem, I inquired one morning, “What would you say if someone asked you who I am?” He replied without hesitation, “I would say that you are nobody.”

When we later explained to him that I was his stepmother, his reaction was one of relief. “Just like Cinderella,” he sighed. At least he had a context for me—whether or not it was a positive one.

I had no better an understanding of the role of stepmother; what I did was try to be a mother. I read bedtime stories, made Rice Krispies squares and sewed on buttons. It wasn’t long before I was the one making sure Greg was enrolled for swimming and soccer and earning Cub badges. One of my more misguided efforts was organizing Greg’s birthday parties.

I would spend an inordinate amount of time finding prizes for ice fishing down the laundry chute and inventing life-size board games to play in the basement; his mother would breeze in with an ice-cream cake she’d picked up at Dairy Queen. The cake, of course, would be what Greg would mention as the highlight of the party when I tucked him into bed that night.

Greg already had a mother. He would quickly correct anyone who mistook my identity. Mother’s Days came and went, usually without recognition for the role I played in my stepson’s life. (Although I was both saddened and touched when he showed up at the doorstep on his bicycle one year with some wilted flowers he had evidently been hiding for me.)

Our daughter was born when Greg was five. He was delighted to have a baby sister, his father was thrilled to have a daughter and I was relieved to be a “real mother” at last. My partner and I had still not married. There were too many times when I wanted to jump into my car and drive away from a life over which I seemed to have little control. In addition to his scheduled periods with us, Greg came to spend weekends or stay with us whenever his mother didn’t have time to take care of him or had other plans; my time commitments and my plans were largely immaterial.

Once my daughter was born, I abandoned any fantasy I had of raising a child alone. She screamed for most of her first six months of life, and I was extremely grateful for her father’s support when he came home from work. I thought that having a child of my own would make me happy; I discovered that as much as I loved her, she was not a solution to my angst. I had, however, waited a long time for this much-wanted child and couldn’t imagine having someone else raise her, so chose to maintain my freelance writing business from home. Clients were understanding when I breast-fed her at meetings or changed her diapers on boardroom tables. I found I was adept at typing with one hand. I could work once I got her to sleep at night or while she played at my feet during the day.

Prior to my daughter’s second birthday, her father and I decided to marry and buy a house together. I found it discomfiting to have Greg’s mother drop in on some pretext or another at any time, or to have her feel free to go through the house looking for something he had left behind. I thought that legitimizing our relationship and having a home in joint title would change the power imbalance. Surely a wife’s needs and feelings would matter more than an ex-wife’s. Surely a wife would have the right to be considered a bona fide stepparent who could attend parent-teacher meetings. Surely I would have some say over who could and could not enter a house to which I held joint title.

Marriage was not a solution. My home—even with my name on the title—never felt like a safe place for me to be. Not only was it subject to invasion, but it was under constant surveillance. I don’t know whether it was simply Greg’s nature or whether he was questioned at the other end of the telephone line, but everything we did and said was reported on. Although I attempted to define boundaries over the years, any efforts in this regard were seen as attempts to deny access. For example, not allowing Greg to call his mother until after he had completed a chore I’d asked him to do was denying access rather than eliminating one of his favourite stalling tactics. This goldfish-bowl existence made it difficult for me to relax and be myself.

“All he needs is love,” I was told repeatedly by my sisters, who had no experience with, or understanding of, step-families. Love was dangerous territory for Greg and me; it equated with loss and pain. This little boy lived with us only half the time. Each of his departures was like a death. His empty room, his empty chair, his baseball glove by the back door were daily reminders of a missing son. Because of the acrimony between his mother and me, I didn’t dare call him when he was there; I could only blow him kisses to the moon and hope he’d know I still cared about him. Loving me was just as dangerous for him. Whenever he betrayed feelings of closeness to me, his mother grew angry.

When he was in Grade 2, Greg started to call me Mom partly out of self-defence. His little sister had begun to say things like “She’s my mommy; go back to your own mom,” if Greg was sitting on my lap and she wanted me to herself. He told me it hurt him when his sister said I wasn’t his mom, because “you’re my mom too.” His mother read a journal entry he had written addressing his father and me as “Dear Mom and Dad” and made it clear to him that he only had one mom—her. He came back to us a different child. There was no eye contact. He mumbled, walked slowly, didn’t answer questions, didn’t do what he was told and seemed on the verge of tears. I had to agree in mediation, instigated by his mother, not to allow Greg to call me Mom.

I was not to be a mother to Greg, which left me in the rather thankless position of being an unpaid nanny. Because I worked from home, I was expected to take on much of the responsibility for him when he was living with us. I was expected to do laundry and clothe him, but his real mother had the right to phone and insist he wear the outfit she bought him for his school picture. I was expected to make sure he did his homework and help him with it but not entitled to sign permission slips for field trips or attend school functions.

I began to step back. It seemed safer to keep my distance, lavish my love and attention on my daughter and provide Greg with custodial care. This, however, brought me criticism from my husband and sisters for not “loving” Greg. One complaint was that I used a “frosty” tone of voice when I asked him to do things. I know I did adopt a harsher stance with him so that there could be no question of disobeying—no chance for him to say, “You’re not my mother; you can’t tell me what to do.”

I know I sometimes acted like the classic wicked stepmother, and it’s been hard to forgive myself for it. When Greg and I had lunch recently, I apologized for using him as a scapegoat. “It worked both ways,” he pointed out with his twenty-year-old insight. “It was easier for me to think everything was your fault than to blame my parents.”

Surviving in a “blended family” continued to elude me, though not for lack of trying. For years I thought that if I could only be a better person, a more perfect parent or partner, more compassionate toward Greg’s mother or find the right rotation schedule, everything would work out. I have a whole shelf of books and a file folder two inches thick with articles on the subject of stepparenting that I’m now contemplating turning into a book-art project—stacking them up and gluing them together in the shape of a zero.

The material I read and the courses I took made it clear that I was supposed to be an “adult friend,” not a parent, but how to be the “adult friend” of one child and the parent of his sibling at the same time was something I never figured out. How do you discipline one child but tell the other one he has to wait until one of his real parents is around? How do you cook or do laundry for one child but not the other? Perhaps the adult-friend relationship would have been easier to establish had Greg been older when I came into his life, but this was a child I had taught to print and tie his shoelaces, whose diapers I had changed.

I was not the only one who was having problems with life in the blender, as I tended to think of it. Much of my husband’s anger at his former wife was misdirected at me—he would even call me by her name. There were times when the stress in our home was so high that our daughter could be found cutting the hair off her dolls or holes in her favourite dress. Greg referred to “Mom’s house” and “you guys’ house” never “home,” chewed on his hands and was continually in trouble for acting out at school. Once he drew a self-portrait of a small boy being torn in half.

For many years, I was a willing participant in my partner’s ongoing power struggle with his former wife. I profoundly regret my role as accomplice. It was safer to see her as the cause of all our problems than to look closely at the man I had married. In fact, for many years she functioned quite well as a smokescreen.

One summer when our daughter was seven, my husband was embroiled in yet another expensive legal battle to have Greg live with us, ignoring my pleas to stop playing a game that was no-win for everyone. Emotionally distant at the best of times, he had become increasingly preoccupied and evasive. When I expressed my desire to leave our marriage, he told me I could go if I wanted to, but he wouldn’t let me take our daughter. I knew I didn’t have the financial means to fight for custody, and I knew I couldn’t give her up. I felt trapped and hopeless. One night, on a family holiday at the lake, there was a meteor shower. She woke up and begged me to take her to the dock, away from the lights, so she could see the falling stars. I was frightened I would drown both her and myself.

I tried desperately to stay in the marriage until our daughter finished school, but I was marking time, not living. When I turned forty-five, I realized I couldn’t go on. I decided having a divorced mother would be better for my ten-year-old daughter than having a depressed mother or a dead one. I announced my intention to leave and take her with me. This time my husband didn’t stop me.

She sees her father one night a week, alternate weekends and any other time they choose to get together. As I had predicted, he continues to be a caring and involved father. I made many mistakes, but having a child with this man was not one of them. Leaving him was a wise decision too. I am happier than I had imagined it was possible to be. For the first time in my adult life, I feel a sense of hope.