I don't really know why I haven't written a post about this particular subject until now. Maybe it's because over the last eight or nine months I have neglected my writing due to the fact that my life as I knew it was abruptly flipped upside down and dropped on its head. Usually I process a major life change by writing about it- it's my therapy. However, when a pipe bomb exploded in the middle of my content little existence I couldn't gather enough fragments of the shrapnel to form a coherent thought, let alone a written expression that resembled anything readable.
For those who have recently began reading this blog (thank you, by the way) you can find the details of this metaphorical explosion in my last post of 2009 entitled "Christmas Eve and Miles Away from the Ordinary". Suffice it to say, the dust has settled and the entire family is adjusting quite nicely to what I refer to as the "new normal". One colossal slice of this new existence is that I now have a stepfather...
I have to repeat that... a stepfather. I swear the word looks like it's written in a foreign language. I am all too quickly approaching my 26th birthday and as of December 27, 2009 I have a stepfather.
This is beyond weird for me. For starters, Mom and her new hubby live in Montana while I reside with little family left to speak of in Maryland. I don't know Step Dad very well. I spent a handful of occasions with him during two visits he made to our fine state before he swept Mom off to the land of cowboys and shooting your own dinner. I like the man just fine and I'm sure that the more time we spend together the more fond of him I will eventually become. But let's face it, although he makes her deliriously happy and that thrills me, he's the guy that married my mom and took her 2,700 miles away. So referring to him as my stepfather at this juncture still feels like I'm attempting to speak Russian.
Anyway, the truly surreal segment of this whole chain of recent events is the completely unnatural dynamic shift in my relationship with my mom. Because now I am the old married lady with a whopping two and a half years of marriage under my belt and she is the fledgling newlywed fumbling her way through her first year of marriage like Bambi learning how to walk for the first time. Yeah, she did do the whole first-year thing 27 years ago when she married my dad. However, their marriage was so steeped in passive aggression that they probably spent the whole year exhausting themselves trying not to go through the necessary tumbles and fumbles that eventually lead to a happy frolicking deer. So now I get to watch as my mother, the woman who raised me and taught me every last little thing I know about life and love and men, tackles the infamous first year of marriage.
I imagine this would be a lot more fun to witness if we weren't essentially on opposite ends of the country and she wasn't undergoing a long frustrating course of chemo which inhibits her from traveling. I'll tell you what though, I love hearing her rattle off the laundry list of the very same complaints that I used to bring to her when I myself resembled little Bambi. I swear to you, it's more satisfying than a bag of Double Stuf Oreos, a glass of cold milk, and a Sex and the City marathon to hear my own mother tell me that now she gets it. Now she completely understands why I would call her late one night crying about how I couldn't put up with Brandon's shit anymore and by the next morning I would be informing her about what a spectacular husband I had found myself. Now she totally gets how you can be so deeply in love with someone who quite often makes you want to grab the back of his head and slam his face into the coffee table.
I'm fairly certain that during my first year of marriage my mom and quite a few others were holding their breath to see if Brandon and I could actually survive. My mom perhaps more so than others because she was the one receiving the late night phone calls about what an idiot the man I married was. Of course, Brandon and I thought everyone was crazy because we knew our fights were just our way of breaking each other in. We knew we would make it, and that we would be stronger as a result. It took being a newlywed herself for my mother to realize that although my marriage may have had its messy moments, Brandon and I knew what we were doing (more or less). Let's just say she has a whole lot more faith in our relationship now that she's been down in the trenches herself.
This whole process has not only been outrageously amusing for me, it has also cemented my mother's and my relationship as friends. We're two women navigating the early years of marriage together. I offer my insights as someone who has been married a little longer and she still has wisdom to offer way beyond my scope of understanding because, well, she's my mom and she knows everything!
I still don't know about the whole Step Dad thing though- it's so weird.
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