I am a step child and I am learning something new today.
I have always felt the sense of entitlement to the things that belong in my
father’s house. You know as a child you deserve some privileges and it is
mandatory that you receive such—love being the most important. But for the very
first time, I saw life through the eyes of another woman, my step mother. I realized
how much I had missed the picture while growing up. I was all this time, trying
to fit into a family that was never mine to begin with. I felt guilty of
robbing the picture of family to my father’s legal family, but most of all I could
now see mother bird’s point of view. I am impressed it is a picture, I adore seeing.
By default, all a woman expects from her
husband is Love, protection, providence and fidelity. But what happens in the
face that he fails at one of them if not most of them? While I am all grown up
and know better than to throw dirt on my past, I finally saw the need for a complete
family, through the details of my father’s home. I was stealing from this
family and I was being on the offensive as well. All that they were as a family
was what God intended it to be. It was never meant to be a picture of step
children looming in the background. No one ever prepares to be a step mother,
as much as any child to be a step child but what if in the need to be accepted by
the people that sired us, we end up hurting the people who find themselves
caught up in their husbands weaknesses?
Growing up we all dream of happily ever after, two
and half children and a Pickett fence. And there is nothing that brings us back
to the reality of such wasted dreams as a child born out of infidelity. Here I
was, looking at the photos that hung up in my step ma’s house and all of them,
for her babies, the real members of this family. I could not bear the guilt of realizing
the pain; it takes for another woman, to raise children she did not envision in
her ever after. I thought of what I would do if it happened to me, I thought of
the pang of betrayal and worse more, I remembered the pain of those many
teenage years of mischief and cantankerous outburst. Oh the lot women have to
bear. I saw a family, that has over the years been weighed down, by the weight
of five children, all born out of wedlock. While we might be a blessing no
matter how we showed up here, I finally feel the pain of any woman, seeing not
one but five children that are not hers run around her home...her children’s
home. They have to share with her children and get of everything her children
get. It is not something I would look forward to. Yet she endured it all
through the years, the humiliation, the bravery, the patience, all that a
faithful wife endures. I did feel her heart tonight. I finally realized that,
that was not my home but someone else’. It was for my step mom’s and her children
and husband.
I am my father’s child but not one to rob another
family of a chance to be happy and keep a picture of a full family, maybe it is
not too late to let them enjoy that reality, how it should be, just them as a
whole family. I would love that if I was married. We all never prepare for
broken homes and when it comes our way, we are only hoping that those children
will understand it, it took me a while but I see it now. A family should never
be broken much less intruded on.
