Alex and I met on a blind date on December 1, 2006.
At the time, I lived in a small cabin in the middle of the Pine Barrens - I had been a self-proclaimed hermit on a dating hiatus for about a year and I enjoyed living alone. Thankfully, the apartment got cold in the winter and one completely serendipitous day, I called a guy about delivering some wood for my teeny-tiny fireplace. The morning he and his wife showed up to drop off the wood, it was pouring and dreary outside, I was hungover, and my knee was swollen to twice its size from a mystery bug bite I got the night before. I wasn't looking my best by any means and in truth, I was waiting for them to make the delivery and leave so I could take myself to the E.R.
For some reason, though, I invited them in for a drink - and to make a long story short, she asked me for my phone number because she wanted me to meet a family friend. She thought I was a nice girl. Was I crazy for giving it to her? Definitely. But I certainly never expected it to turn into anything.
Weeks later, on Thanksgiving in fact, she called me to ask if I'd like to come over for dessert and meet Alex, the family friend. I thought there was great potential for an incredibly awkward situation if we didn't hit it off, so I lied and said I was hours away at a family member's house - in truth, I was only blocks away at a family member's house. The next week, Alex called me and asked me out - I had never been on a blind date before and it made me nervous, so we arranged to meet in a public place for dinner. On December 1, we had our first date. Not taking into account the fact that my first words to him were, "I'm so sorry I have short hair!", we had a far better time than I expected - so good, in fact, that I was completely freaked out by how nice he was. (In my head, the hair was going to be an issue because I imagine that most men appreciate long, flowing hair.) I was trying to figure out why someone would divorce him and lots of potential flaws crossed my mind that night.
That line of potential flaws (none of which turned out to be real) kept me from returning his calls for the next two weeks. That and the fact that he seemed a tad too perfect for me. Finally, he left me a frustrated message that he claimed would be his last. I don't know if it was the chutzpah I heard in that message or something else I couldn't put my finger on, but that night I finally called him back and the rest is history.
It was quite awhile before I met Sydney, partly because she lives several states away and partly because we were trying to be gentle about it. The first time I saw her, Alex had just brought her home from the airport and she was standing in her bedroom unpacking. She looked at me warily, smiled, and said very quietly, "Hello." We went to a Phantoms hockey game that night and I remember very distinctly that she sat on one side of Alex and I sat on the other. I thought how very symbolic that was - that we were both now being forced to share this important guy.
It was a difficult game to sit through - everything he did with me, she did with him. When he held my hand, she grabbed his other hand; when he offered me his soda, she asked for a drink, too. I understood that it was a defense mechanism, a child's way of saying, "He's been mine longer than he's been yours." But when I stole the hat off Alex's head and reached around his back to give it to Syd for safe-keeping, the ice started cracking. That night, she got a bad nosebleed in the back of Alex's old truck and we bonded even more while I tended to her dripping nose and later when I tried to get the blood out of her white coat.
Syd and I, like Alex and I, have had our ups and downs, but to be fair it was a smooth transition compared to what it could have been. We have always included her in important decisions - we asked her permission to get married and we included her in the planning. Though she couldn't go house-hunting with us, we considered her needs in every single house we checked out, even though she only stays with us three or four times a year. Still, there is always a subtle hint of competition when it comes to Alex's love and attention - it's not easy to share.
But here's what I see now: my husband and my stepdaughter rocking out (rather badly) to Guitar Hero in our home, where we all have a defined place. Sydney, who is now almost 11 and already five feet tall, sleeps in a purple (technically "orchid corsage") bedroom that she helped paint, with posters that she tacked up and her giant suitcase in the middle of the room. The cat sleeps with her instead of me now and when she comes to visit, the dog greets her before she greets either of the people who take her out and feed her. She helps me bake cookies around the holidays, we go camping and adventuring in the summer, and she mentions to me things she doesn't tell her dad. (Some things are the same, though - she still calls me T.D., a nickname she made up two years ago that stands for "Tara Doodle". And though she hated it when I first started calling her Sydney Bean, she now expects and, dare I say, even likes it.)
She's growing up so fast. Today when we canoed in the lake at the end of our street, she and Alex paddled...and we didn't spin in circles! She was too big to play on most of the playground equipment in the park across the lake. And, of course, her vocabulary has advanced to include words like "hell" ("What, T.D.? It's a place, isn't it?") and "crap" ("Well what else am I s'posed to say when I'm aggravated, T.D.?").
When all is said and done, she'll probably be at least six or seven inches taller than me. One day, she'll be more interested in boys than in us (she already has a "boyfriend"); she'll want to stay home, where her friends are, in the summer; she'll get a job and start driving, go to college, and maybe meet the love of her life. She'll suffer losses and celebrate big wins, and maybe she'll find out all the things her dad and I have known for a long while but have tried to protect her from. She'll love us and hate us and be completely indifferent towards us and she'll do all the things that we (unfairly) did to our parents.
In the end, "step" means whatever you want it to mean - in my case, being a stepmother has been a life-changing challenge that makes me view the world in an entirely different light. My actions all have long-term impacts on Syd and her generation and my words carry weight that I will often not predict. I'm not the center of her world in the way that her parents are, but my actions matter enough that sometimes the lessons she learns here travel back home with her. Her words and actions matter enough to me that sometimes I learn things from her that no one else could teach me.
One thing's for sure - I think I'm always going to be T.D.
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