My ex-husband’s fiancée is new to the mix. The rest of us have grown together over the past four years into a parenting hydra that might not look exactly like the other couples on the soccer field but that lumbers forward, functioning with or around each other to the best of our abilities and hopefully in ways that help our daughters navigate both regular childhood and divorced childhood (which in many places is synonymous with regular childhood, but by happenstance not in our communities). D’s mother’s boyfriend raised a daughter with his first wife, so he’s been down the parenting road before.
This will be my ex-husband’s fiancée’s first marriage and as of yet, she doesn’t have a child of her own. I like the relationship she is slowly building with my daughter, and to my delight, she and my ex have just bought a house in my town, which puts all of T’s parents within blocks of each other—as good a divorced situation as a divorced situation can get in my opinion, given that we all do get along. On this particular soccer Saturday, the first time she is with our hydra, I find myself wondering what it all looks like through her eyes. She sits on the grass with my ex, sipping coffee and lightly touching his fingertips with hers.
She is in the toughest role right now, stepping up to step-mothering for the first time and doing so before she is a mother in her own right. Watching her watch the girls play, I remember so vividly how tentative I was around D’s mother the first year. I wanted desperately to do everything right, to be the perfect stepmother, to never interfere, to be firm but kind, loving but not smothering. I thought with enough information (and some infinite reserve of patience I had yet to ever discover in other facets of my life but was sure I could muster for my stepdaughter,) I could be that perfect stepmother.
Why is it so hard to learn the lesson that there is no such thing as the perfect anything—not even the perfect fall morning? Gusts of strong wind have already turned the air cold, and I wish I had worn a heavier sweater. I think my saving grace is that before I became a stepparent, I had already resigned myself to imperfect mothering after trying and trying and trying otherwise. What will the path be for my daughter’s new stepmother? Will she find me a help or a hindrance, or—most likely—both? Regardless, though, of what our relationship brings, the hydra will absorb it, growing bigger, lumbering on, making the best of what we have and, if we’re lucky, cheering loudly, lustily, and powerfully for our daughters to succeed.
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