Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  So many of my important life events have played out like a version of “Things were going so well until THAT happened.” This is so much a part of my story that I have come to expect it. But on my wedding day to Bruno, Hapless Amy stayed home. Pratfall Amy was otherwise engaged. Unhinged Amy took a powder. Showboating Amy, Selfish Amy, Judgy Amy, Cranky Amy, Loudmouth Amy, Obnoxious Amy, and Anxious Amy must have been attending an Amy support group somewhere, because they did not show up at my wedding. The Amy who did show up is the Amy I like the best: the hopping, happy, joyful middle-aged woman who never expected a perfect wedding, but got one anyway.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Powdered Wife

  When Bruno and I returned from our honeymoon (I wanted to go to Cooperstown; he took me to Italy—further proof that I had married well), I entered his home and the deep, broad, and complex realm of his family as a full-time member. Bruno and I were wildly in love, and now that matrimony had ended our voluntary chastity, we set about doing what newly together couples tend to do. However, we were both middle-aged and with an audience comprised not only of our own daughters, but also of both of our families and, it seemed, the entire population of our hometown.

  I’m sure I’m not the only woman in the world to be in a newly sexual relationship while also going through perimenopause, but I certainly felt like it, as I shopped for birth control and menopause remedies at the same time. Although my doctor had described my eggs as “geriatric,” I reflexively chose to try to protect my elderly eggs like an old hen facing life in a new coop. I hadn’t shopped for birth control for many years, and my expectation that I would be able to find something—anything—at my local Walgreens came crashing down when I wandered over to the birth control aisle and saw that it had become a sex emporium during the several years I had spent regrowing my virginity. I saw shelf after shelf of what can only be described as “enhancement” products, highlighted by several rows of technical-sounding condoms that seemed more terrifying than useful. My antique diaphragm was meant to be paired with products that no longer seemed available. Or perhaps the condoms had simply pushed the spermicides onto another shelf, and I would find them snuggled up next to the tube socks.

  I faced this dearth of options by appealing directly to the pharmacist, who located a dusty box of sponges in the storeroom. Ah, The Sponge! It was like seeing a treasured artifact from a previous life—like finding my letter sweater in an old trunk. As the pharmacist handed the box to me, promising that she would order more, she reminded me that I had gone to high school with her mom.

  The other items in my basket that day were hair dye, which guaranteed “complete gray coverage,” and an estrogen product that promised relief from “hot flashes, night sweats, stress, mood, and memory.” I threw in a package of actual sponges for cleaning in an effort to camouflage my other purchases and to prove my life sponge-worthy on multiple fronts.

  I was a newlywed. An over-the-hill, root-dyeing, hot-flash-suffering, slightly lumpy newlywed, but still—a bride. A wife. I gloried in my wifely status. All through our honeymoon in Italy, I declared to my new husband, “Mi esposo, please bring me uno gelato, subito!” as we strode hand in hand through the hill towns of Umbria. Bruno and I frequently glanced at our simple gold wedding bands. I signed my notes and texts to him “Wifey.” He signed his “Husband.” I was secure in and delighted by my spousal status. I hoped the stepparenting aspect of my new life would more or less take care of itself.

  Like all prospective stepparents, I was swept into this challenging state on a tide of excitement and love. I buried my trepidation and declared to myself, “I’ve got this thing nailed! I am, after all… me.”

  But the thing about being a stepparent is that other people are involved, and they are children who were not raised by you. They were raised by others, and they have their own personalities, characters, rhythms, challenges, and secrets—as well as their own dynamic and ways of relating. You, the stepparent, are the interloper. You are the new kid at the lunch table, and you’re asking everyone to make room so you can wiggle your way in.

  When I entered the household, three of our five daughters were there to warily greet me: Angela and Michaela—both starting their senior year in high school—and Avila, in fifth grade. Clare, twenty, was away at Bryn Mawr. Emily, also twenty, was at William & Mary. She was the daughter I had raised and the only child whose middle name I knew.

  The house I moved into is a sturdy Victorian farmhouse nestled between two hills, surrounded by 220 acres of forest and farmland. Sheep graze in the pasture across from the broad front porch. Bruno had sweetened the deal with his daughters before my arrival by renovating the kitchen and master bedroom and by screening in the porch. Not only can Bruno sling a hammer to make structural adjustments, but he also tends to drill straight to the heart of the matter when emotions get tricky. We were both confident in his ability to fix anything.

  Bruno had been living alone with Avila, Michaela, and Angela for about five years before he and I met. After the divorce, everything eventually settled down and his three younger daughters lived full-time with him. He was a handsome, burly guy running his own construction company, and he was also a very involved dad, with a household of beautiful daughters. And, yes, from many angles this was every bit as adorable as it sounds. I could practically see the movie poster in my head.

  I arrived with one wheelie bag and my adored orange tabby cat, Chester, transplanted the four miles from my house on Main Street. The family had an ignored barn/house cat named (sigh) Kitty and a young, bounding, and dopey black Lab named Calvin. Calvin kept after Chester until, about a week after we arrived, my tabby decided to pack his little hobo bag and take to the open road. Eventually I found Chester a mile away, heading toward the highway and the prospects of a better life, eating Hot Pockets scraps at the Dandy Mart. I stopped my car in the roadway and Chester looked up at me from the ditch. He looked very small. I knew there were foxes and coyotes about. “I’m sorry, little pal, but we live here now,” I said to him. He hopped in through the car’s open window and I took him back to the house.

  I kept all of my personal possessions and clothing at my house on Main Street and spent our first months together bringing in clothes and my prodigious coat collection one item at a time, as I wore them. I also brought a few paintings, which I hung in the living room.

  I felt like Mary Poppins, entering a household with one carpetbag, out of which I pulled everything I needed. I continued to use my house as an office. Every day when I went there to work, I would sit on my own couch, watch my television, bathe in my bathtub, and fix my lunch in my own kitchen. I was discovering that, unlike Mary Poppins, the contents of my carpetbag were not enough to sustain me. During uncertain times, I derived great comfort from being surrounded by my own things. I also spent some of this private time performing my middle-age ablutions: tweezing my eyebrows and chin with the aid of a magnifying mirror, bleaching my impressive mustache, dyeing my roots, and occasionally doing jumping jacks in my bathrobe while listening to the radio. As I grew older, I was amazed at how much maintenance it took just to look like myself. These were activities I didn’t necessarily want my new stepdaughters to witness.

  This ability to have some privacy eased my transition and spared our daughters the shock of the sudden arrival of another parent in their lives. Instead, I slipped in gradually.

  Bruno had ideas for all of us from the get-go. He seemed to want an instant blending, as if he could add a portion of powdered wife, mix thoroughly, and create a family. I appreciated his enthusiasm, but I knew this would never work. One evening very early in my life in the household, Bruno declared to me, “Give Avila a hug!” Poor Avila stood there, looking miserable. My heart broke for her. I cannot imagine anything more awful for a young preteen than to have to submit to a hug from your brand-new stepmother. I declined the hug and instead offered her my patented “sidewinder”—a sort of sideways shoulder squeeze—and Avila looked relieved.

&nbs
p; School started two weeks after I moved in, and I attended back-to-school nights, introduced myself to teachers (they’d all attended Ithaca schools, unlike Bruno and me), baked birthday cakes for our two September birthdays (Avila and Michaela), and went to soccer games and track meets. I enjoyed going to games, which was one parenting experience my own nonathletic daughter had never given to me. I was an enthusiastic sideline cheerleader, all the while hoping that eventually I’d be on the same team as these new daughters of mine.

  I tried to give myself—and them—time. I didn’t want to rush things, but instead tried to get to know the girls gradually, based on our shared experiences. This is the only way to know teenagers, because teens are wise and wary about people. I was raised by a mother who loved teenagers; she was a great listener with a high tolerance for complication. My relationships with Bruno’s girls were complicated by a factor of ten, and my understanding of them happened in fits and starts. In addition to being my new stepdaughters, Angela and Avila were adopted. Both Bruno and I come from extended families with many adopted members, and my experience is that each adopted person reacts differently to questions of birth, family, and parents. Adding a stepparent to the relational mix is introducing yet another X factor into the complicated family diagram.

  Bruno and I were attempting to blend cultures, as well as adjust to everyday differences in the way each of our families moved through the world. Actually, Bruno wasn’t attempting to blend anything. He loved me, and he loved having me around, but he kept forgetting that the ladies in the household didn’t know one another all that well.

  Michaela was studious, determined, and ambitious. She ran cross-country, wrote for the school newspaper, and had flung herself into preparing her college applications. Avila was the adored youngest—affectionate and sweet, but shadowed by occasional bursts of anxiety. Exotic, gorgeous, and with a radiant smile, Angela never talked about how she felt. She rarely discussed her frustrations or even how her day was going, instead holding her feelings behind a quiet and stoic façade. Angela had extended family in the Dominican Republic, and although Bruno and the kids took annual trips there and Angela talked to her grandmother, aunts, and older siblings by phone (she was brought to the States after both of her parents died), I worried that she felt homesick. Occasionally she described complicated and colorful dreams, full of symbols and portent. Angela’s deepest feelings seemed submerged and out of reach.

  In the evenings when it was her turn to cook, Angela would put on a CD of Latin music and create wonderful meals of chicken, rice and beans, and plantains. Though she was always polite, her temperament seemed to range between stoic and miserably unhappy. Bruno insisted on trying to plow in and fix whatever was ailing Angela, but although she was completely fluent in English, her deeper emotions seemed somehow lost in translation. I could see that she was very attached to her two sisters and was especially tender and loving toward her youngest sister, Avila, painting her nails and letting her clomp around in her high heels.

  Angela didn’t always come home after school, preferring to stay with a girlfriend in Ithaca. At times she dodged phone calls regarding her whereabouts, and Bruno and I were unsure about how to react. As my first autumn with the family progressed into fall, I started wondering if Angela was basically trying to move out of our house in stages, much as I had moved in.

  Bruno and I continued our romance, which now felt so different from our courtship. Marriage and family life seemed to be adding layer upon layer of depth to a relatively young relationship that was still growing and evolving. As a couple, we drafted along on Bruno’s original intent, shared in our very first phone call, to “do everything differently this time.” We simply tried to be intentional and kind to each other and to the girls. I extended this kindness to them in the ways I knew how, by not caring in the slightest whether or not they kept their rooms neat and by taking up some of the domestic slack in the household, cleaning up after supper and emptying the always-full dryer. I left piles of neatly folded clothing outside their bedroom doors and bouquets of wildflowers on their crowded bureaus.

  Soon enough I realized that, to the girls, my most appealing qualities were that I had a driver’s license and a car. Having another driver in the household meant that everybody got to go where they wanted to go and that there was an extra person to share the chore of picking up groceries. Driving them places and doing errands together helped us get to know each other better. We each revealed a little bit about ourselves through trolling sales at the mall and revealing our yogurt preferences. And we talked. There in the car, I’d hear about school, sports, college choices, and middle school milestones.

  Bruno tended to deal with his parenting challenges by matter-of-factly tackling one little emergency at a time—always focused on putting out the fire, getting dinner on the table, and starting afresh the next day. Consequences didn’t always seem consistent or balanced. Thus I arrived at the essence of the stepparent’s eternal lament: I saw things from a different perspective because I had no history with these children and was blind to the nuances of their behavior. I tried to support Bruno, but sometimes I found myself advocating instead for our daughters (after all, I, too, had once been an adolescent girl surviving a divorce). At times I was tempted to pull out my metaphorical puppets in order to entertain and win their trust and convince these cool girls that I was a cool mom. Occasionally, when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by the chaos or uncertainty of being a parent in a family of five children, I eyed my wheelie bag in the corner of our bedroom and fantasized about my own escape.

  When there was a dispute, argument, or problem between our daughters, I mainly stepped into the background. I’d weigh in privately with Bruno after the fact, whispering to him up in our bedroom. Bruno and I also tried to confine our own disputes to the cab of his red pickup truck. Now, instead of riding out into the night to look at the moon, we stole away from the household to discuss private matters, business schedules, and parenting struggles.

  I rarely corrected or expressed frustration with the girls directly and never tried to discipline any of these very good girls (although they said they could read my face like a book). I forced myself to wait instead of weighing in. My influence was chiefly filtered through Bruno. He was the father, and I became the father’s backstop.

  Keeping my big trap shut was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I hoped that one day I would attain full team status, but I didn’t want to push this too fast. Our daughters had dozens of aunts and uncles, and Bruno’s mother lived just five miles away. They had a lot of opinionated people telling them what to do.

  I had read a number of stepparenting guides to research questions for my advice column, and they all said the same thing about being a stepparent to older children: The primary parent should remain in charge. The stepparent should be a friend. Friendship and parenting are sometimes in opposition, and friendship with adolescents is different than with fellow adults. I tried hard to anchor to the friendship values I hold close—to be supportive and respectful, to listen more than talk, and to be truthful but circumspect. In addition, I tried not to be too intimate, through sharing my own concerns or insecurities with kids who were too young to understand them (and in no position to care).

  I didn’t always succeed in my textbook parenting. Sometimes I caught myself monologuing about my own experiences. And I worried excessively about what my stepdaughters thought of me.

  Our most effective form of mother-daughter bonding in the early days was to complain about and make fun of Bruno, as if he were the hapless dad in our new family’s sitcom. Bruno encouraged this by behaving like a combination of Ward Cleaver and Ray Romano. His old-fashioned values and conservative worldview often translated into quaint lectures about sportsmanship, religion, the value of hard work, and the United States Constitution. These mini-lessons, while sincere and mainly valid, still made all of us laugh. Once I declared open season on their father’s earnestness, the girls and I engaged in a gleeful
household insurrection. But we really reached common ground when forced to listen to Bruno’s daily recitations of his maladies.

  Bruno’s burly exterior conceals a delicate constitution and multiple physical sensitivities that he enjoys drawing attention to and describing in detail. His ailments range the gamut from invisible rashes and digestive problems to self-diagnosed maladies such as toe displacement and chest bubbles. He has a fear of earwigs, tendonitis, and mysterious lymph node swellings. He has an actual allergy to dust mites but an outsized suspicion that he is allergic to many other things. Generally, if anyone in the household complained of any ache, pain, or upset, Bruno would instantly one-up us. If I had a cold, Bruno developed imaginary bronchitis. If a daughter had cramps, he would commiserate by sharing his fear of angina. Many nights after supper he would beg one of us to walk on his back, crack his neck, or rub his tired feet. I offered to pay our daughters to take my turn.

  Ganging up on Bruno was a unifying dynamic that helped us inch closer to one another. We banded together through shared eye-rolls and complaining about this man, whom we all loved, each very much in her own way. Bruno took the family ribbing with good humor; he said he didn’t mind being the household’s punch line, because he loved hearing laughter in the house, even if it was at his expense.

  Blending our two families together involved much more than clearing closet space for my many coats, or convincing the cat to stay in his new home. We were all survivors, to varying degrees, of loss and displacement; we were all players in a new family drama.

  As I started my new life with this family of daughters, I was aware, most often, of what it was like for me. I didn’t consider too deeply what it was like for them. People often say that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience. There around the kitchen table with my new family, we were all buoyed by hope. Experience would prove to be the greater teacher.