My parents separated when I was 3. They got back together a year later and then separated for good when I was 6. It took them years to get divorced, mostly because neither one wanted to budge and let the other one go free to re-build his/her life (healthy, huh?). The divorce eventually happened when my mom’s boyfriend asked her to marry him. She did the paperwork and since my parents didn’t even live in the same country, my dad didn’t have to be there to sign the decree.
Soon after the divorce, my mom married her boyfriend, a man she’d known all her life. They were friends since kinder garden, and 12 years ago, after his divorce, she was there to comfort him. From comforting each other, they fell in love and he asked to marry her. It’s a strange kind of love, both of them confessing that it’s not so much passion or head over heels love, but friendship and companionship that they wanted to have by being together. My mom also thought that since they’d been friends for ages and I was already friends with his children and knew him a bit, the transition to our new life would be easy.
In the beginning, I was very happy that my mom re-married. I was all grown up, I’d moved away and since I’m an only child, I was happy my mom had company. Nowadays, I’m still happy she has company, but I find myself at odds with my feelings toward my step dad and his presence in my and my mom’s lives. He’s got a particularly strong personality,very arbitrary behavior and a knack for unexpected flares of anger. For years, since my mom remarried, I’ve had to put up with his moods, his mistreatment of my mother (to which I can’t react because she’s asked me to not get involved), his very uppity family, and, most of all, his fits of rage against me. Now, before you get worried, there’s no physical violence involved. Just verbal attacks, insults, etc. My mom insists he is a good man, and you just have to be patient. I insist that life is not a bank where 10 good things have to make up for one unjustified explosion of insults and anger. One is already one too many.
Last year, in June, one such flare happened. We were calmly having breakfast, when he got angry because I didn’t know (according to him) the “proper way” to slice a piece of cheese. He got exceedingly (and as usual, very quickly) angry and I got yelled at, called every name in the book and reminded I’m an idiot, useless, etc, etc, etc. All accompanied by fists slammed on a table, him storming out of the house and screeching his car’s tires when he left. My first reaction was of shock and I just started crying, asking him what I’d done wrong. After he left, though, and seeing that my mom had done only a small attempt at defending me, I became angry, and 10 years of bottled-up anger came out. I’d been putting up with crap for years, and getting yelled over slicing cheese was the drop that topped the glass. My mom got an earful of how I’m tired of his yelling fits, his rudeness, his unfair treatment of both her and me, as well as our extended family and how I think that I deserve more respect than that. After all, not only am I an adult who deserves respect, but I’m his wife’s child, and he should respect me for being a part of her. But no. Oh, and on top of that, I reminded her how when he needs a favor, he asks me because I’m “the most responsible of all three kids” (he’s got two children, about my age), but apparently I’m not good enough to cut cheese. I’d had enough. Since then, I’ve refused to go visit my mom (which means I don’t see my grandma or any of my friends), and the last time step dad asked me to buy him something, I spent the money on clothes.
The main issue is that now that I’ve opened the valve and all the years of anger have come out, I’m having a hard time forgiving him and letting go of the anger. But I’ll go more into that in the next post and how that relates to the “F-word” title.
