Marriage was not a solution. My home—even with my name on the title—never felt like a safe place for me to be. Not only was it subject to invasion, but it was under constant surveillance. I don’t know whether it was simply Greg’s nature or whether he was questioned at the other end of the telephone line, but everything we did and said was reported on. Although I attempted to define boundaries over the years, any efforts in this regard were seen as attempts to deny access. For example, not allowing Greg to call his mother until after he had completed a chore I’d asked him to do was denying access rather than eliminating one of his favourite stalling tactics. This goldfish-bowl existence made it difficult for me to relax and be myself.
“All he needs is love,” I was told repeatedly by my sisters, who had no experience with, or understanding of, step-families. Love was dangerous territory for Greg and me; it equated with loss and pain. This little boy lived with us only half the time. Each of his departures was like a death. His empty room, his empty chair, his baseball glove by the back door were daily reminders of a missing son. Because of the acrimony between his mother and me, I didn’t dare call him when he was there; I could only blow him kisses to the moon and hope he’d know I still cared about him. Loving me was just as dangerous for him. Whenever he betrayed feelings of closeness to me, his mother grew angry.
When he was in Grade 2, Greg started to call me Mom partly out of self-defence. His little sister had begun to say things like “She’s my mommy; go back to your own mom,” if Greg was sitting on my lap and she wanted me to herself. He told me it hurt him when his sister said I wasn’t his mom, because “you’re my mom too.” His mother read a journal entry he had written addressing his father and me as “Dear Mom and Dad” and made it clear to him that he only had one mom—her. He came back to us a different child. There was no eye contact. He mumbled, walked slowly, didn’t answer questions, didn’t do what he was told and seemed on the verge of tears. I had to agree in mediation, instigated by his mother, not to allow Greg to call me Mom.
I was not to be a mother to Greg, which left me in the rather thankless position of being an unpaid nanny. Because I worked from home, I was expected to take on much of the responsibility for him when he was living with us. I was expected to do laundry and clothe him, but his real mother had the right to phone and insist he wear the outfit she bought him for his school picture. I was expected to make sure he did his homework and help him with it but not entitled to sign permission slips for field trips or attend school functions.
I began to step back. It seemed safer to keep my distance, lavish my love and attention on my daughter and provide Greg with custodial care. This, however, brought me criticism from my husband and sisters for not “loving” Greg. One complaint was that I used a “frosty” tone of voice when I asked him to do things. I know I did adopt a harsher stance with him so that there could be no question of disobeying—no chance for him to say, “You’re not my mother; you can’t tell me what to do.”
I know I sometimes acted like the classic wicked stepmother, and it’s been hard to forgive myself for it. When Greg and I had lunch recently, I apologized for using him as a scapegoat. “It worked both ways,” he pointed out with his twenty-year-old insight. “It was easier for me to think everything was your fault than to blame my parents.”
Surviving in a “blended family” continued to elude me, though not for lack of trying. For years I thought that if I could only be a better person, a more perfect parent or partner, more compassionate toward Greg’s mother or find the right rotation schedule, everything would work out. I have a whole shelf of books and a file folder two inches thick with articles on the subject of stepparenting that I’m now contemplating turning into a book-art project—stacking them up and gluing them together in the shape of a zero.
The material I read and the courses I took made it clear that I was supposed to be an “adult friend,” not a parent, but how to be the “adult friend” of one child and the parent of his sibling at the same time was something I never figured out. How do you discipline one child but tell the other one he has to wait until one of his real parents is around? How do you cook or do laundry for one child but not the other? Perhaps the adult-friend relationship would have been easier to establish had Greg been older when I came into his life, but this was a child I had taught to print and tie his shoelaces, whose diapers I had changed.
I was not the only one who was having problems with life in the blender, as I tended to think of it. Much of my husband’s anger at his former wife was misdirected at me—he would even call me by her name. There were times when the stress in our home was so high that our daughter could be found cutting the hair off her dolls or holes in her favourite dress. Greg referred to “Mom’s house” and “you guys’ house” never “home,” chewed on his hands and was continually in trouble for acting out at school. Once he drew a self-portrait of a small boy being torn in half.
For many years, I was a willing participant in my partner’s ongoing power struggle with his former wife. I profoundly regret my role as accomplice. It was safer to see her as the cause of all our problems than to look closely at the man I had married. In fact, for many years she functioned quite well as a smokescreen.
One summer when our daughter was seven, my husband was embroiled in yet another expensive legal battle to have Greg live with us, ignoring my pleas to stop playing a game that was no-win for everyone. Emotionally distant at the best of times, he had become increasingly preoccupied and evasive. When I expressed my desire to leave our marriage, he told me I could go if I wanted to, but he wouldn’t let me take our daughter. I knew I didn’t have the financial means to fight for custody, and I knew I couldn’t give her up. I felt trapped and hopeless. One night, on a family holiday at the lake, there was a meteor shower. She woke up and begged me to take her to the dock, away from the lights, so she could see the falling stars. I was frightened I would drown both her and myself.
I tried desperately to stay in the marriage until our daughter finished school, but I was marking time, not living. When I turned forty-five, I realized I couldn’t go on. I decided having a divorced mother would be better for my ten-year-old daughter than having a depressed mother or a dead one. I announced my intention to leave and take her with me. This time my husband didn’t stop me.
She sees her father one night a week, alternate weekends and any other time they choose to get together. As I had predicted, he continues to be a caring and involved father. I made many mistakes, but having a child with this man was not one of them. Leaving him was a wise decision too. I am happier than I had imagined it was possible to be. For the first time in my adult life, I feel a sense of hope.
I didn’t see much of Greg the first two years after I moved out. He lived with his dad one year and his mother the next. He came for dinner occasionally and I received the occasional phone call: “How do you make macaroni and cheese?” “Do you still have my resumé on your computer?” “Would you write me a reference letter? You know me better than anybody. By the way, I need it tomorrow.” During one visit Greg told me, “I know I made things difficult for you at first, Shirley, but look at us now.”
I hear from him more often now that he lives on his own. “Shirley, I haven’t seen you for ages,” he’ll say over the phone. “How would you like to get together for supper?” What this usually means is that he would like a home-cooked dinner and has an essay due that could use a proofreader.
I don’t have a copy of the family photograph taken at Greg’s high school graduation. Neither does he. Perhaps it didn’t turn out. I don’t know how to view my experience as a stepmother. Was it a success or a failure? At the time I left my marriage, I would have described it as a failure. I’m no longer so sure. The fact that I have a close relationship with my daughter and her brother validates the time and energy I put into trying to create a home and family. It felt like family the other night as I massaged Greg’s feet in front of my fireplace while he and his sister visited
. He left with the remnants of our Sunday dinner for Monday’s lunch and suggestions on how to improve his essay.
“Do you still think of me as your stepmom?” I asked him recently. “Of course. Who else would I say you are?” he replied. “Besides, you didn’t divorce me.”
Hiding
Pamela Mala Sinha
for Jule
I try to forgive myself for pulling the covers up over my head. Not every day. But in the time before the Blacks—so that maybe I can stop them from coming. The dictionary defines black as the absence of colour. I see it as a colour.
Almost fifteen years ago, I heard a terrible crashing sound. Are they demolishing the building next door? No. It’s nighttime. I’m sleeping. So much noise that someone’s going to call the police. Another enormous crash. Someone’s here. Inside. I’m being robbed. What happened next, I’ve been told, if it had to happen at all, occurred under the best possible circumstances because I had not done, nor could be accused of doing, anything “wrong.”
What’s incredible is that it almost bores me to write this. I have lived these thoughts so long that everything seems tedious. Redundant. Difficult to imagine as something you would even care to read. I don’t want your pity. Everything I need to be here writing this is already mine; otherwise I would be dead. It’s that simple. What do I want, then? I must want something from you.
He made me eat his shit. He sat on my face and suffocated me with his ass until I did.
I want it to matter. That’s what I want.
I did it. And during that time, I believe there was a moment when I was not there. Not passed-out unconscious, but not in my body. It was possible to remain present until that point. I couldn’t see with the pillow over my face, but I could think, and I didn’t stop thinking. Obeying. Pleading. But when he flipped me onto my stomach I got confused. I didn’t know what he was doing pushing my face into the mattress. I was on my stomach. Why my stomach? oh no. That’s when I left. I left myself behind to be raped that way, left my body there in that bed and walked over—with my nightie on—to my little altar that was set up in the corner and asked God to come out of the picture and burn him. I just stood there, in front of God, repeating, “Burn him” over and over, demanding that what was happening in the bed should end in flames NOW. For a long time I left her to that torture while I stood in front of my God. I was busy begging so I left her there.
When I met Jule, my therapist, I saw in her eyes someone who didn’t fit in the world the same way I didn’t. It wasn’t true, but when she looked at me that first day she made me feel not alone, and for a single suspended second … I felt like maybe I could live. That maybe we would be able, with that torn fragment of my spirit, to seek out what it was that hated me so much to want to kill me.
During a session of therapy more than a year later, she showed herself to us. She called herself Hiding. The parts of that night I couldn’t remember, she did. She was left to live what I couldn’t and she hated me for it. The Blacks were her way of making me know that if she had to bear it, then I had to pay.
It took Hiding seven years to get my attention.
My parents didn’t know the terminology for what he had done to me, just as I didn’t know it was humanly possible to do to a body what he had done to mine. My mother went to the rape crisis centre so she could learn what she did not know. She threw up in their garbage can. She and my father went through this without my knowledge and without sharing it with any of their friends or family. Later, some people thought it was shame that kept their secret. But it was love. Love for those daughters of friends and family who might be robbed of their freedom because of their parents’ fear; love for me, knowing that pity would have surely killed me, even as he hadn’t; and love for their son because they feared that learning of this so far from home would destroy him—that it should wait out the summer until he could see his sister face to face. Wrong or right to those who loved us and deserved to share in our pain at that time, they did it out of love.
And that’s good enough for me.
Sometimes during the Blacks, I would go out to bars to find men to rape me. I carried a large knife in my knapsack. I would wait for a would-be attacker to give me reason to use it. Hiding believed that I should have tried to defend myself that night. There was a window in your bedroom—why didn’t you jump out of it? There were hangers in your closet—why didn’t you use them? Or at the very least, why didn’t you fight him no matter how big or strong or armed or crazy he was because then at least you could SEE the scars of the maiming or at least be dead from FIGHTING rather than lying there like an idiot with the covers over your head, holding your breath, thinking he wouldn’t see you, he’d see an empty unmade bed because you were so thin and small and still.
Stupidstupidstupid girl.
Just before the bars would close, I’d ask the chosen man to drive me out to an abandoned stretch of the lakeshore, park the car and walk with me, miles from any signs of life. He would have to start. If he didn’t start, it wouldn’t count. He would start, I would say no, he would have to try to force me and then, only then, could I use the knife. He would have to insist—there wouldn’t even have to be a struggle, he just had to insist or it wouldn’t count. None of them ever did. They were nice men. They wanted my number.
Doing it “right” means you’ll be okay. Not rewarded necessarily, just okay. Sometimes you’ll be told how to do something right, and the challenge lies in accomplishing the task. Other times the aim will be to determine what “right” means, then to do it. If you do it right, everything will be okay. And if you don’t, everything won’t be okay. But the problem is the assumption that what happens to you is within your control, that whatever you are doing, your choice determines the outcome.
He orders me to hold the position. On my back, naked, pillow on my face, crowbar on the pillow, arms extended, legs in the air, he’s got me by the ankles and he’s jerking my legs around—I don’t understand what position he wants me to hold. He’s yelling at me and laughing at me because I look so stupid and finally he jerks one leg straight up HIGH and the other one bent at the knee. I’M GOING NOW. DON’T MOVE. DON’T MOVE OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU. If I don’t move if I don’t move, he will be gone and I will be okay. I won’t move. I hear the bedroom door slam. I hear him walk away in his big boots. I’m not moving. I’m sweating with the effort. My legs are shaking on the inside because I can’t let them shake on the outside or it won’t be okay. I’m not even breathing. I am still I am superman I can do it I will do it right and it will be okay.
YOU FUCKING MOVED.
He never left.
Pretending to walk away, he walked on the spot. Pretending to leave my room, he slammed the door shut from that spot, all the while standing there quietly watching me, watching. I did not move. He knows it. I know it. We both know I did it right I did it right, what he said. But it’s not okay. I did it right and it’s not okay.
He punishes me for doing it right.
There is not much more I can tell you about that night. Hiding is the only one who could tell you what happened next, but she won’t. She still won’t even tell me. But I know it was bad and I know he did it again and again and again and again and I know I gave up. He broke me with this one. Because it was clear to me that no matter how right I did anything from now on, it would make no difference to the outcome. No difference. He broke my spirit when he robbed me of that belief.
The occurrence of frequent and often violent Blacks seemed to be the only thing I could believe in during those years that followed—going to bars armed with a knife being only one of the horrors of that time. It was the daily rituals that I believe did the most damage. Normal things that terrified me but I made myself do. The front door of the theatre school I was studying at was directly opposite the window of the room where it happened. Every day I made myself walk past that window. For three years. I never used the rear entrance. Never. See, it’s no big deal. After graduating, I moved to Toronto and liv
ed alone. But I don’t want to. And to bear being touched by the man I loved during those years, I would split off—watching myself “act out” from a corner of the room. It hurts. They were endless, those little tortures. But I think I did them because I needed to live as if life from before still belonged to me.
I was invited to perform in a play the role of Artemesia, a visual artist who as a young girl in 1612 was raped by her teacher. For three months, six performances a week, I would tell her story. There would be a rape scene, of course, but I would be acting it. People were finally going to listen to her; three hundred people a night were going to listen. And they did.
Until the night the play closed, and they stopped listening. It was as if she didn’t matter any more, as if it had never happened, as if she … were garbage. I wanted to die.
I nearly did.
I woke up one morning to find myself unable to move. Paralyzed. Incontinent. As if my body had simply quit. I had no choice but to be admitted to an in-patient care facility for women who had suffered from the same kind of tortures that I had. There they gave me a name for what was happening to me: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was a syndrome and it was real. It had a name. Even from that half-dead place, I felt grateful. So grateful. I stayed there for a long time. It had taken seven years to get there. A long time I stayed in that place, and finally I went home. That’s when we found Jule.
And I found myself in hell.
With Hiding.
And with us in hell was anybody who loved me anybody who loved stupidstupidstupidgirl. They were not allowed any reason to love, have faith in or hope for her. My mother watched me disappear a little more each day: retreating into my childhood bedroom, physically and emotionally becoming increasingly, terrifyingly, dependent. She didn’t know if she would ever see me live as an adult again. I resented my father’s innocence. I had always loved that about him—protected it. But at his slightest encouragement, I would remind him that I had lost what he could afford to have—not having had it robbed of him. Though I was wrong—so wrong about that—he said nothing. My parents would listen, just listen to me, trying to see and feel the horror, so that at least this time, I would not have to be in it alone. I could not bear to see my brother’s grief—so I looked away from it. My family of friends I rejected—pushing them away when they wanted to be near. I didn’t want proof of their commitment to me. I didn’t want them.