Treat Me Like A Step-Child?!?

I’m a Step-Daughter. I’m the Step-Daughter of one Wicked Step-Mother and the opposite of that, whatever it may be. Virtuous. maybe? My Current Step-Mother is one of the strongest black women I know, and has a streak of Wickedness that could cut anyone down who she feels has wronged her or a member of her family. She considers me family, so you’ve been warned. She is my Current Step-Mother and though it goes without saying, I love her.

She came into my life on the heels of my Wicked step-mother. I must explain the reasons that at first, I was very leery of who she was and what she wanted to be to me. My father married two women after my Mother had me, the first one was my Wicked step-mother. The reason I call her Wicked without fail is her own fault. That woman was jealous of me and poisoned my relationship with my father before he divorced her. She spent a lot of time feeling insecure around me and she let me know when I was too young to understand it, that she didn’t like me.

She never said it as direct as that, it was always action, never words, but I understood it on a soul-level and couldn’t understand it on a conscious one. She even died not knowing why by the end of her life, I regarded her with cool indifference and only bit my tongue around her out of respect for my Aunt who called her friend. Speaking of my Aunt, she is the number one reason why the comment, “Treat me like a step-child” is a compliment in my family.

My aunt is Step-Mother to two women I call cousins. One I formed a relationship with immediately upon meeting, the other struck me as, well, if you know me, you know what I think of my other cousin. I had the illusion broken when I spent a week with her and got to see under the surface during New Year’s 2000, which up until then was all I’d ever seen of her since her father became my Uncle. I also got my tongue pierced during that visit and she did her nose. I met her husband-to-be, a die-hard black republican atheist who grew up in Germany and I could not reconcile the conflict with those labels. It confused me on an instinctual level, still does if I’m being honest. Today they are happily married and living the dream. Who am I to question?

I’d started letting the term ‘treat me like a step-child’ slip from my lips with frequency by the time I was in college. It was something I’d heard, liked, snatched from the universe and repeated. While walking with my Aunt, Step-Mother to my cousins, she pushed me about the fact that I was a smoker and out popped the phrase from my lips. 

If you’ve heard the term before, you know it is meant to reference most likely the story of Cinderella. It’s supposed to be an insult, but in my mind and because of the examples my Aunt and current Step-Mother set, it never seemed like one to me. It did to my Aunt and I didn’t understand the hurt on her face when I said it. I explained to my Aunt, that I was happy to be a Step-Child. I loved it in fact, because it meant something special and lucky to me. 

My current Step-Mother made a few mistakes when we first met and because of my previous Wicked step-mother I was cautious. I would not tolerate another woman disrespecting my Mother in my eyes. While shopping one day, my current Step-Mother introduced me as her daughter and I corrected her in front of the person with a quickness. I had a Mother, she was and would always be my Step-Mother. Period. I said it, meant it, and did it in front of a stranger. She flushed, apologized and read it as a hard dividing line of how much of a relationship she would be able to have with me. If she’d known then that being a Step-Mother was a good thing, she might of been okay with it, but at the time, she though Step-Mother was only Wicked too.

A taboo in my family is to discuss personal/family business publicly. I have a long list of reasons why there is something I find brave about the current generation being socially transparent and so open on the internet. From blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. if you want to learn information about another person, it’s there. It’s out there for the entire world to see. My Aunt’s generation and the ones before don’t seem to understand it, but it took me a while to get it and once I did, it made me look at the Wicked side of step-whatever with new eyes. 

In a previous post, I’ve talked about the abuses of my Wicked step-father, but what I failed to mention was there was a lot of Wicked on his side of the family. Every single molester I faced as a child save one came from his blood. Not only that, it was considered personal/family business, therefore it was not to be discussed publicly. One time my mother had to make the hardest choice I believe a mother ever made. She had to decide between keeping her job or knowingly leaving me in the hands of a child molester. She chose her job instead of me.

She did arm me with a plan to keep me out of his Wicked hands. She told me to play hide-n-seek. While he was counting I was instructed to leave the house and hide out across the street at a friend's house. I took it to the next level. While he was counting I opened the garage door and unlocked the back door of the house. They were directly across from each other. When he finished counting, I ran around to the back door and watched him enter the garage searching for me. I popped in the back door and locked him out of the house entirely. I was seven at the time, unable to cook, but at least we had potato chips on hand or I would have starved to death until my mother returned from work. 

I didn't know how to apply my experience to other people in my life back then. Give me a break, I was only seven years old at the time. So as the females on that side of my relatives were molested and raped by the males, we were told and believe we could NOT get help from outside what was supposed to be our ‘family’. The problem with that was there was no family to turn to, just relatives. The distinction being, Family will protect, cherish and love you unconditionally for who you are. relatives are related to you by blood or marriage.

My dear sweet Cousin Tracy who committed suicide at fourteen because she was afraid she was pregnant and afraid to tell her mother would have made different choices today, if she’d lived to do so. But because she was surrounded by relatives instead of Family she took her own life. If only she’d realized she always had the help she needed with being a young mother. Planned Parenthood, some teachers, a trusted friend or even a reality show on MTV. The possibilities of where she could have turned are endless. 

Unfortunately for my Current Step-Mother this event coincided with the next major event in my life. It was the catalyst to the conversation that scarred my relationship with my father for the rest of his life. While on the visit where I first met my Current Step-Mother, I had the conversation over Pro-Choice/Pro-Life that ended with my being told by my father, who immediately became my sperm donor for the rest of his life, “I wish you had been an abortion,” when I was 12 years old.

That one comment tainted how I would feel about him, even love him for the rest of his life. He dropped to relative in my eyes and never rose again until after his death. He’d said it in anger and because he was an alcoholic, had no idea the significance of it. It took me a long time to actually forgive him even though I said the words before he died. Something I knew I was going to be thankful I did even if I didn’t know why at the time.

One good thing that came from that comment is it’s the number one reason I will NEVER commit suicide. Well being bipolar I'm supposed to be suicidal, so I'm a smoker. I won’t give my bio dad more than being a pot smoker. Suicide is deciding to abort yourself from the world. I’m never going to grant more than choosing to toke a joint for him. I live in Oregon, it's legal where I live. Personally, I think my father might of lived longer if his drug of choice were weed instead of alcohol.