There’s always a double glance from colleagues or associates when my step-daughter comes up in conversation. Ok so I confess to sometimes walking away with a degree of satisfaction, having wiped the patronising smile off their faces. Other times I feel the hairs on my arms tingle, as the temperature of my blood rises as it pumps through my veins in indignation.

It mostly comes from the stressed out, knackered mums in their 40s, who can’t help themselves from coming out with, “ Well, yes the holiday was good but when you have children you still have to get up and be busy even if you’re not feeling well“.

Really? Well obviously I couldn’t possibly imagine, could I? What with me being so much younger and you naturally thinking I must be living the glamorous newly-wed lifestyle that you’re so now far removed from. But hang on a minute, let’s stop and examine exactly why you feel the need to behave so condescendingly, wanting to give me the, “Ha! Just you wait type glance”. After all I am only thirty but is it impossible to imagine I may have actually had some similar experiences. Not only is it tough when you’re not feeling well but imagine how it feels to be there as a surrogate mum to a child who is ill, vomiting or has diarrhoea. Especially when you know full well they’re really hankering after a cuddle from their own mum.

Perhaps it’s the antagonist inside me but in this situation again, I can’t help myself from bringing up the tale of when we were coming back from Cornwall and my step-daughter was ill in the car. Of course I go a tad over board, painting myself as Florence Nightingale, offering a full set of clean clothes, scooping the vomit out of the back of the car, sitting in beside her in the damp patch to cuddle her while she fell back asleep etc.

With almost boring predictability, by now the colleague will be looking at me with their lower jaw half open. “Oh, I didn’t realise you had a child”, is their first stumbled response, as they look at me uncomfortably, trying to fit me into the imaginary box they and their friends label ‘mother’, while feeling a little uncomfortable or embarrassed. “How old is she?”, they ask next, thinking she must be a toddler (or another misconception, the age of their own child/children). “Oh just turned nine “, I reply breezily going onto my next stock phrase, as they try to do the basic addition, imagining my husband must be approaching forty, instead of him having just turned thirty. “I’ve been with her dad since she was in nappies aged two, so she really doesn’t know any different”. I like to imagine this reply firmly pops the image in their head of me as the evil stepmother from Cinderella.

One or two though, especially the journalists, can’t help themselves from asking personal questions which they think they have the right to know the answers to.
“So what about her mother, is she a nightmare?”, is a surprisingly common follow-up question, or even worse, “ Did you get together long after she was born?”, imagining I’d broken up a young family. Again, I can see the flash of disappointment on their face as I spell out that my husband and her mum have always got along amicably since they became parents, at age twenty-one. Neither one has born the other a grudge as they’ve gone on to continue their careers and families without acrimony. Admirable some might say, and several hundred miles away from the dysfunctional families that are splashed over the front pages of the certain newspapers.

Yet one colleague who was obviously beside himself with the outlandish concept of a modern family including step-children (I mean we are only in 2009 aren’t we?) kept asking me persistently in an open plan office, “ But do you like your step-daughter?”, “ Do you get on with her?”. “ Of course I do “, I replied, “She’s the loveliest, most fun, nine year old I know”, I replied. “ Well how do you enjoy being a step-mum?”. As the whole office I was listening, I whispered, “ Obviously a lot more than you enjoy being a dad”, and stalked off. His flame red cheeks must have matched his flame coloured hair, I could feel the heat in them as I left the room.

My step-daughter has the most beautiful long, golden, curly hair….that is, when it’s brushed. When I hug her hello, automatically I eye up the tangled dreadlocks and decide that one more night’s sleep can’t make it much worse, so decide to go into battle in the morning. 

This isn’t just a one-woman battle.  A couple of months after her dad and I got together, I realised the tears, tantrums and hands-on-scalp, while screaming, could be seen as ‘evil step-mum’ behaviour, so it was better to hand over the weapons (hairbrush and comb) to her dad.

Like most nine year olds my step-daughter is pretty switched on and naturally, when not reminded to brush her teeth or hair, morning and night, will “forget”. Her usual response to her messy hair is, ” but mummy hasn’t got a brush”. How do you respond to that? Plus there’s a fortnight’s worth of tangles to tackle.

Normally she and my husband get home (after the 200 mile trip from her mum’s) late on Friday nights, so Saturday mornings always begin with the Battle of the Brush. Only for the last five years since she’s been in nursery and school, the situation has developed into The Battle with the Bugs.

Her mum’s response to nits isn’t perhaps what you might call traditional. Instead of getting a comb or lotion, why waste the time? You can always just shave the underneath of her head… Yup an an undercut. Just what every little girl dreams of…..shaved hair.  More like GI Jane than Barbie. Three years down the line, of course the undercut has grown back but the nits still haven’t gone away.

A few months ago my step-daughter was again trying to hide her hair from us (not that unusual in a child with an aversion to brushes and combs) after mummy had again tried to beat the nits. This time mummy’s weapon of choice…..why the kitchen scissors of course.

But spare a thought for my husband, who was freaked out by the fact that his own daughter was more worried about his reaction to her hair being lopped off, than she was worried about her locks having been chopped. “Mummy said you’d be cross when she was cutting it”. My husband was speechless.

We’ve glossed over the fact that the hair has been chopped, trying not to make a big deal out of it, and pre-warned the hairdresser not to gasp, when he lifts her hair up to cut the underneath.

To get rid of the nits, well your truly ended up holding a four-hour combing marathon (yup two and a half DVDs) taking every nit and egg out of her hair, section by section. You’ve probably never seen kitchen paper darken so quickly as I wiped the lice off the comb. She was too thoughtful to ever complain about itching and scratching….whereas I, just writing about it, can’t say the same.

School holidays, long awaited for but for my husband and I, the only uninterrupted time we get with his daughter. Granny had kindly saved us the 200 mile round trip to collect her from her mum’s, and after they got to ours, it seemed the birds and the bees were very much on my step-daughter’s mind.

“Mummy says babies come out of your tummy button but they can’t do as they won’t fit…..?!”, is how the conversation between Granny and Grand-daughter had started, on the four-hour car journey to our house. Granny went for the wide approach in answering, not wanting to confuse further, nor lie.

As I’d taken the week off work, Day 1 of our holiday began with a trip to the Natural History Museum. The big challenge was not the how much info is appropriate for an eight year old  but rather how not to contradict your step-daughter’s mum. Naturally I chose the coward’s way out. Avoiding the “Mummy’s wrong”  approach,  I steered her around the 30 minute Dinosaur queue and instead went for the,“let’s see the human body exhibition instead”.

Twenty minutes later the pair of us were sat listening to the mother’s heartbeat, as a baby in the womb hears it. I was hoping that along with the diagrams of the umbilical chord, the illustrations of the baby’s head emerging between the mother’s legs (and not from the belly button) all questions had been answered with no signs of major embarassment on either part. Fortunately by then my nearly nine year old step-daughter, seemed more interested in the interactive brain display than the reproductive cycle and didn’t even look twice at the anatomically correct, mannequins of children, teenagers and adults.

Two weeks later on her next weekend with us, I gave her with a book on babies and giving birth and have to admit, it’s the only book I’ve seen her read from cover to cover.  We were in the car (yes it was that good a read, it came with us to go to the shops) and it was hilarious trying to read over her shoulder while driving, and saying, “pay-nis and va-gina are a really good guess but they’re actually pronounced penis and vagina”. Then quickly adding, “they’re the biological terms that a doctor might use, they’re other words for willy or your front bottom”, not daring to guess what they might be referred to at her mum’s.

We had a giggle at the cartoons of a man and woman cuddling with hearts all around them, and although she still can’t bring herself to use the words ‘nipple’ or ‘breast’, without shuddering or breaking into fits of laughter, it feels like she’s comfortable with the info on sex. What was more impressive was the light bulb effect when she was reading about at the same-sex partners who adopt babies. “Well you know several same-sex couples….” I said and in return I got the , ” I may be only eight but I’ve already mastered the disparraging look of a 14 year old”, that pre-pubescent girls scarily pull off. When I mentioned the names of two male, family friends she came out with,“ oh, I thought they were brothers”…..