Simple Gifts

It's been months. Months and months and months, I know.

I stopped writing here a long time ago, because, for a long time, things have just been even, and steady, and good, and I didn't feel the need to tell stories that had amusing slants to otherwise difficult episodes. Life became normal, I guess, in a good and happy way, and I just kind of stopped needing to be the struggling heroine in a saga about love and selflessness, unrequited.

Then, today someone asked me for the link to this blog, because she has a friend who is a newlywed and a newlystepmom of a 13 year-old girl, and she thought it would help. Everything challenging about stepparenting came rushing back to me. "Bless her heart," I thought.

It's a funny phrase, "Bless her heart." A kind of catch-all they use in the south to describe someone who's doomed, and who has no idea she is. I don't know if my friend's friend is doomed, but face it, even in the best case scenario, that is going to be hard. Territorial divisions, symbolic boycotting of cooperation, thanklessness, dramatic button-pushing--these are things every teenager does, and teenage girls tend to do it so all so well. It's hard enough when they're your own. But when they're your stepchildren, and they come into your lives in that stage--yikes. That makes it all really hard.

But it can also be really wonderful, eventually.

And I realized that here I am now, with Jeep Boy an 18 year-old, college-bound adult (who, by the way, had another party in our house when we were on vacation last week, we just found out, and I am going to kill him for that later, remind me if I forget) and Hammerhead 15, deep-voiced and the fuzzy shadow of a mustache on his sassy upper lip. If this is a marathon, I'm on about mile 23. Wow. I'm almost done.

Wow.

Last weekend, I was looking at pictures of these boys when we first met--they were 4 and 7--and I was overwhelmed with memories of these last eleven years: of removing splinters from their grubby paws and re-homing spiders found in their bedrooms (both areas of my particular expertise), of running to comfort them when they woke crying at 1:00 in the morning with night terrors (Perfect Man sleeps like a log), of cooking breakfasts and driving to friends' houses to pick up/drop off, of birthday cakes made and laundry washed, of soccer practice and karate practice and drum practice and orchestra concerts (ouch, my ears), of resolving battles, meting out consequences, and soothing hurt feelings. The times we butted heads, the times they turned to me, and all the times in between.

And I was aware of something very profound and very simple: that through the conscious sharing of these last eleven years, the fabrics of our lives have been woven together, and we are part of the same narrative. And I am aware that I love them, and that they love me.

For a long time, I really wasn't sure that they loved me. But after yesterday, I am.

I have a terrible cold this week, one that has me flat on my back. The boys came home from school yesterday and shouted around to see where I was. When Hammerhead found me up in my room, looking like something the cat dragged in, he stood at the foot of my bed. I thought he was going to ask me if he could have a snack, or if I could take him somewhere. But he asked me if I wanted a cup of tea. I said, "Yes, please." And then my insolent, stubborn, sarcastic, rigid, hard-headed 15 year-old stepson went downstairs and made me one, brought back up, and put it gently down on my bedside table.