Whoduhthunkit!?

After putting myself, or at least 5 points of me, out there like that I got to thinking. There’s a lot of "old tape" that I’ve, well, not forgotten, but surpressed to the point that I am no longer sure that it effects my every day life. I certainly spent enough time and money on therapy so I could talk it out with a professional and learn some skillz that assured that. I didn’t want those two sick twisted people that raised me to have any more power over my life than the amount they originally got when I was a child and had nowhere to go. Some of this was fixed by therapy, a lot was fixed by the love of a good husband and his family, and the rest…*shrug* I deal. What I did gain for sure though was the ability to live day to day without dwelling on the past.

And then one of my kids asks me a question and it all comes pouring back.

Last weekend we went to the local discount movie theater - you know, $.99 per person for a matinee (This goes somewhere I promise). We saw Open Season which I distinctly kept feeling would have been funnier if Ashton wasn’t one of the character voices in it. The casting could have gone better there…I love me some Martin but Ashton pshh…anyway. We enjoyed the movie and the plan was to drop off some bags of old toys as we passed by the Goodwill drop on the way home. As we walked out of the theater (this is where the theater has some relevance), my eldest stated that he had to go through HIS bag quickly because he had accidentally stuffed his "Benny Bunny" in it thinking that THIS particular bag would "go up in the attic for HIS kids when he had them". Yes, sometimes I save some of their more memorable stuff for thier children but old toys aren’t some of them…it’s more of a "security blanket, first Tonka truck" kind of thing. For the record - Benny Bunny is the name of his "security animal" that he cuddled as a baby. It was a gift from my mother in law who had heard about MY Benny Bunny when I was very little and wanted my son to have the same. Well one thing led to another and not only did the boy get his Benny back but he also asked me about MY Benny and after answering some silly questions (like "What if this is YOUR Benny Bunny come back to life?") I was brought around to telling them the whole story. To cut a long story short, this toy which I was VERY attached to had been a gift to me from my mother, basically all I had of her after my parents divorced and she disappeared for  quite a long time. My father remarried and my step mother was well aware that I (a) missed my birthmother and was not happy that stepmom had arrived to try and "take her place" (b) missed my Nana as well, I had been placed with her for a time while custody was being decided by the judge, and (c) was VERY VERY attached to this little ragged stuffed animal. Despite these things, one day in a  moment of anger (I had trespassed on HER stuff by trying to play dress up with her clothes), she made me take my own Benny outside, walk it to the dumpster, and throw it away. I can remember begging and pleading, promising that I was so sorry and that I would never touch her things again.

I was 5.

I can personally guaruntee that my mother in law didn’t know about the dumpster part of Benny’s existence. I never got that Bunny back and since my birth father had told her the story about Benny to suggest a gift idea that would touch MY heart (he did a lot of things to try and impress people and he knew that remembering tender things from his daughter’s childhood would make him look a LOT better and make ME look unreasonable for being distant with him even if I had tried to forgive him), he would skip that bit.

So here I am now at the other end of this story as the adult now. I look back and think what a horrid sick twisted person she had to be to force a child to do that. How she must have actually looked for a way to deliberately HURT a child by doing that. Only a heartless person would make a child throw out their last remaining link to their mother in retaliation for…what… "You touched my STUFF!?" I had damaged NOTHING. Not only was she completely insensitive to her stepchild, she was cruel.

And then it hit me.

As a stepmother I had always proceeded slowly and with respect when it came to forming a relationship with my own stepdaughter. My daughter’s mother had not disappeared but that didn’t mean she didn’t love her Mommy and wouldn’t feel loyalty to her. Sometimes a stepchild feels like accepting a new parental unit would be betraying their birth parent. As a former stepchild I understood that.

I also, even before I felt the tremendous love and devotion for this little girl, made sure I was always LOVING in my manners and attentive to her needs both physical and mental. There was no way that this little girl was ever going to think that she was any different from a birthchild. She would always be a child I was devoted to from the very moment she became a part of my life.

Now I know why I was so darn careful in the beginning of my relationship with her.

I had remembered without realizing it.

So in this way, however small, I take back some of the power that the stepmother had taken from me as a child. Her painful actions became a lesson and  strength for me. I learned and lived from her mistakes. One way of looking at it is "I win".

Now if only I could let go of the PAIN of that memory, that walk I still take to the dumpster, weeping, in my mind.

Always remember…the things you do and say can not be erased once they are committed. Try to never do things that will leave lasting impressions of BAD. A child’s mind is like a blank slate - what you write on it will never completely disappear - it leaves traces and will be replayed again and again.

And if at all possible, if YOU were that child, take those harsh lessons and turn them around into something you can DO something about. I learned what NOT to be as a stepparent I suppose, how to proceed in a loving, non threatening, and respectful way. I have a GREAT relationship with my daughter who is now a teenager, lives over 1,000 miles away and calls me HERSELF at least once a week. For a teenage girl to take time out of her day to call someone like that…

I’m a very lucky Mom!