>To My Stepdaughters
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Dear Girls,
Here’s my deep, dark secret: Most days, I think I suck as a stepmother.
When I was preparing to be a mother, you see, there were endless books and manuals explaining precisely what I’d need to provide for my new baby. When I was preparing to become a stepmother, though, there was nothing. No colorfully illustrated books. No glossy STEPMOTHER! magazine. Not even the shoulder of a fellow stepmother to lean on. I was 25 and knew absolutely nothing about what you both needed, or how I was supposed to give it to you. I was a new bride and every bit as concerned with my five-color blonde highlights as I was with what we’d all be doing when you visited each weekend.
Seven years later, I’m a mom and a stepmom, and I have a much better idea of what I could have and should have said and done for you at the tender ages of 8 and 10.
Seven years later, it’s too late.
You are young women now, eager to be perceived as adults, shrugging off hugs and embarassing displays of affection. You roll your eyes at me and heave sighs and, tonight for example, knit your brow when I ask for the phone number of a new girl you’re spending the night with this Friday. I understand that it’s pretty much your job to do these things (hell, I remember doing them myself once), but that doesn’t make the blows to my ego any easier. I blunder on in the dark, at times instructing you not to sass me in my best motherly tone, at other times taking the wounded I’m-not-your-mother-I’m- youngish-and-hip-and-why-are-you-treating-me-this-way approach. For all the clever plans I’ve made over the years about how things are going to be in this blended family, in the end I always end up winging it, terrified you’ll call my bluff and recognize me as the fraud of a pseudo-parent that I am.
And yet, you haven’t. You’ve taken all the many changes in your lives with relative good grace and humor. For all my angsty online narratives, we have a good relationship, better than any other stepmother/stepdaughter daughter teams I know, better even than many mothers and daughters. I can look back on our past together and remember lots of hugs and cuddles and dancing and hair styling. It’s been good.
But it could have been even better, a voice inside me says. If you were a better person, it could have been even better.
Why am I writing this now? Why am I beating myself up over a past that I can’t change? Well, I want to remind myself that it’s not too late, it’s never too late to try and improve things. Too many people tell me, “You’re doing the best you can. Don’t worry about it.” But I do worry about it; I want to worry about it. I want to constantly question whether I could be a better stepmother to the two of you. I have to be more creative now that you’re teenagers and consumed with school and soccer and social lives. Finding an opportunity for quality time with each of you is even harder when I add your busy schedules to my own, which includes caring for an infant and a three-year-old and working from home.
But I can do it and I will. I love both of you more than I ever thought I could love and there’s got to be a way to make sure that you leave this house some day and set off on your own holding that knowledge in your hearts.
Love,
Your Stepmom
This post originally appeared on Parents.com.
