The Stepmother Chronicles

I did not expect the new hairstyle grandma took Stepteen to get to be so . . . Jennifer Anniston? So mother-of-toddlers-who-lives-in-a-nice-suburb?

Not that there’s anything wrong with well-heeled suburban mammas with highlights in their hair.

I just expected the goth-ish anime fan to go for black hair and something more choppy and spiky than that.

M: I utterly failed at the charming reaction you’ve so carefully taught me. I could not remember to say brightly, “You must love that new hairstyle!”

Yowee, I seem to have had 3 or 4 real readers! I thought this account was e-mailing me when I had to approve a comment, but apparently I unchecked that box at some point. I know it is discouraging to comment — and maybe even hope to start a dialog — and then never see the comment. Sorry!

And if I deleted as spam your apparently off-topic, but truly relevant, comment about prom dresses, socks, hot water heaters, or the usual drugs — apologies indeed!

The other morning, I was hopping mad about how much time Teen spent on the internet when we were at a music festival on Sunday. I didn’t get to write about it, and now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say and how I was going to make it interesting.

“The rule is two hours a day; you were on for eight.” That’s not an interesting story. Maybe the interesting bit was the occasional two-minute bursts of homework, like looking up science terms?

Maybe I need to learn a valuable lesson about how anger passes, about waiting?

Seriously, kid: you are about to turn 15, you go to a very selective high school, and Grandpa bought you a very nice laptop computer. Why can’t you: find a weather forecast, look at the geometry teacher’s website to see when quizzes are, tell us what’s going on at school, or make your bed in the morning??

Oh, I see: your internet browser history indicates that you were on neopets.com and YouTube for 30 minutes this morning and 45 last night. I am all for recreational use of the internets, just not at the expense of being ready for the school day.

It’s all really frustrating because of how badly she wanted to go to this school. She interviewed at the arts governor’s school, told them she knew art wasn’t a realistic career goal, and that she wanted to be a forensic scientist. Her portfolio was minimal and half-assed. She was stunned she didn’t get in. The international studies-government governor’s school wait-listed her. She got into the City’s IB programme, a reputable program, but she whined about it being at the ghetto school. I’m tempted to take her on a car ride to see Armstrong and Marshall, but I digress. She decided the governor’s school was the place to be and she moped about all summer waiting for the call. It came moments before I went to wake her up to go to IB orientation!

We scrambled and got everything done so she could go to the gov governor’s school’s two-day orientation on time with everyone else. We are amazed at the curriculum, sense that there’s a good mix of people there, and are proud she’s going. And she shows her unreadyness for this great opportunity with a window left open on rainy day, an unmade bed, Ds and Fs in geometry, and hours whiled away with neopets.

I was in the middle of proofing the entry below (I know: hard to believe that I proofread my writing: I am always shocked and awed by the typos I notice only days later) when I heard a crash from the dining room, then a dripping sound. An entire bowl of Cheerios, dumped on my Heywood-Wakefield dinette. It seems the kid takes her cereal with about 3 cups of milk.

The table doesn’t have its original finish: its current finish is like the original would have been: nice and thick and slick. Not much harm there. I did worry about milk seeping into the unfinished edges as it worked its way into the splits for the leaf, but more than that, the hardwood floor, with pretty much no finish or top coat needed mopping and drying pronto. I had just enough time to pull out the leaf and dry the edges and find my wood-floor-cleaning product and mop — and then shower — before leaving for work at noon.

Ever since that run of 100 degree weather in June, I’ve had the core part of my little ice cream maker in the freezer. The idea is that one keeps the core frozen so that one can just whip up some refreshing ice cream at the drop of a hat.

If one is in the habit of keeping at least 2 cups of cream and 2 cups of whole milk in the house at all times, that is! And, really, I think that the recipes that turn out the best call for making the base ahead of time and chilling it for 8 hours. Well, I didn’t plan that far ahead, but we did get the needed ingredients at the store on Sunday, and Husband had the clever idea of saying, We’re going to make ice cream this afternoon, what’s a good time? That way, Pod got to set the time, and I didn’t have to fear one of those mini dramas where she’s all I don’t feel like doing anything / I don’t want to get off the computer right now.

She picked 3:30, and at 3:45 she wandered down. She measured sugar, I broke the eggs and turned on the Mixmaster. I reread the directions aloud. Husband came into the kitchen and made noise. I measured the milk, cream, and vanilla and mint extracts. I poured it in and showed Pod how to turn it slowly 3 or 4 times every so many minutes. Only, somehow, I lost track of how many minutes to wait between turns, and suddenly we’d waited way too long, and it nearly wouldn’t turn at all! So I had to be all, See it’s important to read the directions more carefully than I just did.

Sigh.

Yesterday, I sat around in a suburban orthodontics practice waiting room for about an hour. More so than substitute teaching or the middle school visits I do for work ever did, it made me grateful to have adolescence way behind me.

Even though most young patients led the interactions — signing in on the clipboard themselves, waving off accompaniment into the mysterious back room — an air of sheepishness hung about them. They exhibited exasperation when their moms (all kids were accompanied by women; I was the only one dressed as if I had come from work) asked the technicians or receptionist clarifying questions. They stumped around with out grace. A tall boy wore jeans that were a tad too short. A tiny girl wore stylish-enough cropped cargo pants that must have come from the little girls’ department, but shoes in a size 8 or so (a strange contrast to taking Pod’s measurements to buy a bathing suit from a catalog and wondering whether we’d be shopping in Women’s Plus Sizes).

Pod had broken some contraption that goes with her braces. It has to be sent off to be repaired: that will take 4 - 6 weeks. She’s going to be in these braces until she’s 18, at this rate, so I foresee more perching in uncomfortable chairs, trying to block out the TV playing “High School Musical” with my New Yorker.

She’s not pouting, I am. The other week while she talked to her mom on the phone, she sat next to my spider plant and petted and rubbed each leaf until all were bent and broken. Four or five leaves on the floor were my first clue. When I looked at the pot, the soil was littered with half a dozen leaf tips. What the?! One or two leaves come off in her hand and she doesn’t know it’s time to quit?!

It was a scruffy specimen to start with, now with over half its leaves brown and bent it looks worse.

The plant abuse was topped days later. I’ve already said I try to stay out of her room, but you know it’s a lie, right? Husband and I have clothes in that closet, and books on the shelves. What I did after the plant incident was to change the sheets and gather up dirty clothes to take to the laundry (we have it done). Somehow in all that, I looked under the bed: two pairs of underwear (dirty? clean? Didn’t study it.), 3 unmatched socks, and MY PINK WPA POSTER TSHIRT. Again, What The?! So she got the wrong shirt in her stack of clean clothes back in September, when I would have last worn it, and stuffed it under the bed?? She let her own clean clothes sit in a heap on the trunk at the foot of the bed until the stack toppled and my shirt went underground, to collect dust bunnies??

I pitched a fit. (A pair of her underwear in the middle of the floor, with a -ah, used pad contributed, too.)

Later, I apologized for yelling, but it upset me to find my shirt under her bed, in the dirt.

Since, she’s meek and tidy. We’ll see if it lasts.

Not that shouting is s strategy on which I mean to rely.

My mom used to hide treats (Tastykakes, usually) she wanted for herself from Sibling and me. She hid them on the top shelf of the pantry. She stashed them on the top of the big freezer in the utility room. Once or twice, I found mini candy bars way up high in a dish cupboard, where seldom-used serving pieces lived.

Whether she stopped hiding things high up when we approached her nearly-5′1″ mark or whether the age at which we got that tall coincided with when we were mature enough to follow a rule like You may have one Tastykake after school; not the whole box, I cannot say.

I (5′4″) can say that I have been hiding M&Ms from Husband (6′1″) and Teen (5′7″) at the bottom of my pantry, where they never look.

The first time I met Husband’s folks, his mom wanted to go to the new lifestyle center (i.e., upscale mall) in the suburbs. Kid had not yet turned 12 (nor was she taller than I am). She hated shopping and pitched some kind of fit as we entered. One point of contention had to do with Grandma suggesting that Kid needed some “cute shoes, maybe loafers,” not sneakers. I really think she said “loafers” not “flats” or “dress shoes.” The other topic on the table was along the lines of “why are we here I hate shopping — why can’t we do something I like?” The Folks sweetly took Kid and let Husband and I walk away from the whole scene.

About ten days ago, Husband mentioned that the Kid had a long weekend coming (a teacher workday and President’s Day) and the she and pal, A, were making plans to go shopping. Because Kid’s soon-to-be-ex-stepdad (i.e., her mother’s soon-to-be ex, to whom she was married a couple of years) gave her as a Christmas gift a $100.00 gift certificate to Hot Topic, they needed to go to a mall with an outlet of said chain purveyor of black clothes and “goth” trinkets imported from China. Thankfully, A’s pop took the girls so I did not have to witness first-hand the selection of the knit cap with pointy ears, the black net gloves, or yet another striped top with skull-and-crossbones motif. They went to the very same lifestyle center of The Shoes Fit.

I feel both shocked and appreciative that ex-stepdad would give such a generous and, admittedly, appropriate gift. Kid said (or, rather, “replied with disdain and dismay” when asked if she had thanked him) she called him after she got the gift certificate to say thank you and did not need to write a thank you note as I suggested.

On days that I go to work at 12:30, I close the door to Kid’s room. I can’t let myself be distracted by what’s going on in there; whole mornings are wasted that way. As I pulled the door shut just now, I noted that the new striped top draped over the dresser lamp. Do I live in some kind of stage set: At left, Messy teen’s room??