Now, at almost eight years old, T. is far more aware of the changes that her father’s marriage represents for her life than she was when her stepfather and I wed. She understands that her father will no longer be exclusively hers, and over the years, she’s grown accustomed to weekends with his undivided attention spent at movies, museums, Chuck E. Cheese, and other bastions of American childhood culture. She knows that Chuck E. Cheese with her new soon-to-be stepmother in tow is NOT a date with her daddy.
In the weeks after my ex’s announcement, T. let her feelings fly.
“I’m not ready for Daddy to get married,” she said almost daily, accompanied by tears. My husband and I talked her through it, letting her express her feelings. D. provided perhaps the most help of all when T. asked her what having a stepmother (ME!) was like for real: D. shrugged and said “it’s just someone else who loves you and takes care of you.” (cue tears: mine, of happiness!) D. also gave the wisest piece of advice I’ve yet to hear: when T. followed up by asking if it was confusing to have a stepmother and a mother, D. said “my mom is my mom. My stepmom is my stepmom. That’s not confusing.”
A month before the wedding, T. proudly told me that she, her dad, and her stepmother-to-be had decided on her outfit. She’d be wearing tuxedo pants, black shoes, a pink button-down shirt and a satin red-and-black vest. She shopped for all the pieces with my ex’s fiancée to make sure the colors matched the wedding theme, and began to come home from these trips happily chatting about the stripe on the pants legs and the belt they found for her to wear.
To say I was relieved was an understatement. T. would be her true self at the wedding, not a stick figure shoehorned into a storybook. Then I thought: why had I been so worried that they’d make her wear a dress? Her dad knows what she likes and doesn’t like, and all evidence had shown that his fiancée agreed. So why didn’t I trust them to make choices with her best interest at heart? I think the answer is that I wasn’t fully ready for T’s daddy to get married because it meant that another grown-up woman would influence my daughter’s life—and it was because I knew that influence would be positive that I was so resistant. A large part of me didn’t want to share T. with another woman: this mother-bear instinct led me to jump to unfounded conclusions.
