WWBD?

Okay. Last night was the night that finally got me to do this, start this blog, this constructive, creative outlet, where I can turn my miserable failings as a stepmother into light, fluffy, amusing anecdotes, so we can all laugh together at how RIDICULOUS I am, ha, ha, ha! Because after last night, I realized it's this or perish. And I'm not ready to perish.

What happened was that I had a stupid, stupid battle with my thirteen- year-old stepson, who for the purposes of this blog, will heretofore be known as Hammerhead. Hammerhead is by turns brilliant, arrogant, sweet, insolent, lazy, funny, and absolutely, impossibly stubborn. What was the battle about? Well, that's the good part: Buddha. We fought about Buddha.

That was the subject of his "I Am A Famous Person In History" report. He wanted help with his Buddha costume, an orange robe, and came into my study, wearing it. "Can you help me pin this?" he asked.
"Sure." I said. "So your Buddha's wearing an orange robe? He's an Indian Buddha?"
"I don't know," he said. "Buddha."
"There are lots of Buddhas," I said. "'Buddha' means someone who has become enlightened all on his own. Not a specific person's name."
"Whatever," he said. "It doesn't matter."
"Well, yes it does," I said. "If you want to be accurate. So which Buddha are you?"
"It doesn't matter," he said.
"You know, Hammerhead," I said with itchy irritation, "it seems as though you didn't really do much research on this report."
"Well, that's just your opinion," he said.

That got my hackles up. "I will not help you with your orange robe," I snapped, and things very quickly, very dramatically devolved from there. Before the end of the night, both of us were in tears.

What is this all about?
I would like to be able to say that it's partly about my frustration with the lousy education both Hammerhead and his brother are getting. In the ten years I've known them, I've not seen either of them read more than two books. Hammerhead's brother is 16 and can't write. This is no exaggeration. Last fall, when he asked me to check a report he'd done, it was so full of spelling and grammatical errors, I didn't know where to start. When I tried to explain the difference between possessive and plural, and which one needs an apostrophe, he didn't understand a word I said. And yet, he currently has an A in English. And Hammerhead is sure to get an A on his Buddha report, mostly because of the orange robe. The thing is, neither of their parents care, which should be my cue to also not care. But there's a part of me that thinks because I know the difference, I have an obligation to help them understand it, as though allowing them to turn in badly researched and written work is like letting that poor woman who's accidentally tucked the hem of her dress into the waist of her pantyhose walk out of the restroom and back through the restaurant, baring her unattractive fanny to hundreds of strangers, getting laughed and pointed at, and suffering terrible, terrible humiliation, from which she may never fully recover. How dumb is that? Pretty dumb.

But mostly, the thing with Hammerhead is that he pushes my big red button: Someone telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, when I do know what I'm talking about. (Okay, even if I don't know what I'm talking about. I just don't like being dismissed.) And Hammerhead, who knows this very well, is a Dismisser Extraordinaire. He has the maddening ability to brush my authority away as though it were a swarm of harmless, annoying gnats, saying things like, "Just leave me alone! I don't care what you think about this! Why don't you mind your own business? Get a life!"

When you're the mom, it's easy. You say, "You may not speak to me that way! And you may not do another thing tonight until you re-write this report so that it is at least factually correct. Get to work." End of conversation.

But when you're the stepmom, it's complicated. You can ask your stepchild to please speak to you with respect, but you can't mandate it. Just like you can drive your stepchild to school, the dentist, the skatepark, you can cook your stepchild dinner, birthday cakes, late-night snacks, you can make sure your stepchild is safe, you can buy his clothes, take his temperature, remove his splinters, but you are not in charge of shaping his character. That is not your job. That's where the line is.

I know this, but I keep forgetting it. So instead of detaching and walking away, I stand there paralyzed, incapable of comprehending the scene before me--as though I were watching a duck do calculus. And as the indignity of it all sinks in, as I stand there unsure of my role, my place, my rights, I begin to feel like a stranger in my own house, one with no arms, no mouth, no legs, no brain. And I am filled with fury, because I hate feeling helpless. And I behave very, very badly.


The nine characteristics of a Buddha are as follows:

1. a worthy one
2. perfectly self-enlightened
3. stays in perfect knowledge
4. well gone
5. unsurpassed knower of the world
6. unsurpassed leader of persons to be tamed
7. teacher of the gods and humans
8. the Enlightened One
9. the Blessed One or fortunate one


I have a long way to go.