rookie
When I first came on the scene in this family, I was 23 with two braids and hot pink socks. I would go to Rosie’s school concerts and parent-teacher meetings and be clearly new and uninfluential. The teachers didn’t look at me when they spoke, and I probably didn’t look at them. I had no title then. Or rather I was Rosie’s dad’s girlfriend, and that didn’t sound very sturdy. Forms would come in from Rosie’s school and I’d triple-guess myself before I entered even her birthdate.
When we were married, after four years of feeling apologetic for even taking up a chair at parent-teacher meetings, it was much better. I was the stepmother, which sounds like mother if you mumble the first syllable. It was more clear that I was there to stay.
But no one likes a stepmother. I felt it when we moved into our neighborhood. Having a stepmother means that the family went through some pain in the past and I’m the tacky band-aid. It means there was instability and I’m the false impression that now everything is on solid ground. And I’m a threat, or at least I sometimes perceive that, to the real mothers: I’m the younger version of the other mothers — those fights those mothers have at night with their husbands, I’m the possible outcome. I’m the woman who could climb on board their ship that sank and wave a new flag, holding their kid’s hand. And who knows how I came on board this particular ship: maybe I stole my husband from his then-wife (I didn’t). And if I’m not a threat to some real mothers, then I’m probably invisible to them. They know I haven’t been through what they’ve been through, and who knows where my loyalties are — stepmothers don’t have a reputation for being all-loving.
I thought about all of this so little in the past couple of years. But now that I’m pregnant it’s coming back again. For two years I was almost one of them: I’d raised Rosie for six years, we’d been in our neighborhood long enough that the neighbors knew we were good people, I’d been to enough of the school concerts and parent-teacher conferences that the teachers and parents remembered me. I don’t usually wear two braids anymore, and I don’t have any hot pink socks. I was feeling older, out of graduate school finally, and seemingly commuting Rosie all the time. But yesterday at the parent swim meeting, I felt it again: I stick out like a sore thumb. I’m the only pregnant one in the room. I’m going through something that the other parents went through fifteen years ago. Pregnancy means a beginning — which means, to these other parents, that I might be a brand new wife. I look so young again, not even able to sit up straight because my back hurts, or I’m too full or too hungry, my cheeks flushed, my hair thicker and messy. I feel like a rookie all over again.
