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.
