chapter four - are you my mother?
My step-mother saw herself as some sort of super-mom. For whatever reason, it was critical to her self-esteem and self-concept to identify as a mother, and for everyone else to see her that way. She had to have children around her, and the more, the better. She had to be the one who gave birth to all of us. She had to be the one who took care of all of us. She had to be seen as the one who could do it all: cook, clean, sew, and take under her wing any and all children that crossed her path. She had to be Nurturer-in-Chief, Wife of all Wives, Donna Reed in Stepford Wife disguise. My step-mother absolutely reveled in pretending that we were all hers. It was borderline pathological, but it served us well in some ways. The reality was that she was the only one of my assorted parents who was warm and affectionate in any way. My father and mother were distant and cold, I think both as a result of their personalities and as a result of the circumstances of their lives. For my mother, I think her life moved too fast for her to keep up, and we got lost in the process. My father simply wasn’t around enough and didn’t seem to have the slightest interest in being a parent until his miraculous conversion following his third marriage. As a matter of fact, he was a completely different parent to my half-brother, the son that he had with my step-mother. He tried a bit with the rest of us after that, but we had a hard time letting him in and would even make fun of him behind his back for offering too little, too late. By contrast, my step-mother had her moments of sweetness and kindness toward us, and I appreciated it. She truly tried to be a mother to us and I know that she did her best, and I will always have a special spot in my heart for her because of that. How do you simultaneously rip babies from their biological mother and then expect them to see you as some kind of Father-Confessor and Mother-Savior? Besides that, it takes a very special person to be able to love children who are not biologically one’s own as if they are; my step-mother was not one of those people, and I am not sure how capable my father is, either. I don’t think my step-sister was impressed with his parenting skills. Her connection to her mother was always very evident and very strong, but that might have had more to do with their shared gender and biology than any parenting deficiencies on my father’s part. He certainly did not treat my step-brother as badly as he treated me and my siblings, but the dynamic between them was, naturally, completely different. For one, I think my father was basically the only father he had ever known. In any case, my step-mother favored her biological children, and treated some of my father’s children better than others. She just couldn’t help herself. She just didn’t have it in her to do what was needed for these deeply wounded little ones that came under her care, and to treat them as her own, no matter how hard she tried. On the other hand, we wanted this new fantasy life to be true and good and real as much as anyone. We bought into it, hook, line and sinker. After all, who wants to be seen as coming from a broken home? Who wants to be seen, by themselves or by outsiders, as damaged goods? Who doesn’t want “and they all lived happily ever after”? Adults spend all of their lives in search of happy endings, so it can’t be very hard to imagine how easy it was to enroll very young children in such a game. There were benefits, too. For the first time in our lives, our home life was stable. My father was around in a way he had never been, and he turned out to be a smart and funny man. We got a kind of attention from my step-mother that we had not previously known. Her family embraced us without reservation, so we suddenly had a large and loving extended family as well. We had extra playmates, in the home and in the larger family. We believed we were doing good for the foster children that came though our lives, and felt good about that. Perhaps we were even eating better, and were better clothed. People in our church and community admired us. There were many advantages, tangible and intangible. Can you say “Stockholm Syndrome”?
