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I am so grateful for everyone who reads this blog and takes the time and energy to comment. Or doesn’t comment, but still reads. Thank you, truly. Thank you for checking in and bearing with me . Thank you for getting my sense of humor.
Blog reading is a heavy duty commitment. So I'm taking Wordless Wednesday up a notch and introducing Commentless Wednesday. Every once in a while I will post something a little different from what I normally post and I will close comments and that takes all the pressure off you to respond. So, here it is--pressure free blog reading (there will be a quiz on Friday.)
I have a 14 year old stepson who lives in Europe with his mother. I’ve known my husband’s son since he was two years old and the first few years, I’m ashamed to admit, I would stick my tongue out at him whenever I was relatively confident that I was unobserved. I was single and I didn’t have children and I couldn’t help but feel jealous about the obvious bond that pre-Husbandrinka had with his ex. They had a son, and he was adorable. I kept a journal back then, one of those pretentious leatherbound volumes that I am always too intimidated to write in, but the one thing that I did manage to scratch a few months after I got married was “my husband has a son. He is not my son, not even a little bit.” I think about that sometimes. Look, if you had a pretentious journal, you’d be all pretentious about it too.
He visited us a few times every year and his father went to visit him a few times more. As he got older, our relationship evolved around the fact that we have a very similar sense of humor. We all went to Paris last spring and he couldn’t stop laughing at my utter inability to speak French. I think he first thought that I was sort of faking and then he must have assumed that it was some form of a learning disability.
Because there were five of us (me, Husbandrinka, our two kids and my stepson) and the Parisians are neo-Nazis when it comes to the three person per cab maximum, we would split into two cabs routinely. I would often seek to be in a cab with him, not only because he had a cell phone that worked in Paris but also because he could speak French to the driver and translate my anxiety.
“Where is he taking us?” I asked him one day when the cab driver did a complete U-turn and started driving us away from our destination, racing down the Princess Diana Boulevard of Death. “Let him know that if he’s planning on dismembering us and throwing our remains into the Siene that President Bush will not think twice about adding France to the axis of evil.” He laughed. But for some reason refused to translate.
His mother is sick. She will not get better. I went to see her last year and had a very Lifetime Television for Women moment and told her that I would take care of her son as though he were my own child. She thanked me. She said that he loves coming to New York because I am so nice to him. (She is incredibly gracious and always has been. Thanks a lot for not giving me any evil ex fodder. And yes, I realize that he loves coming to New York because it’s NEW YORK CITY! And not because I know some really good knock-knock jokes, but I’ve been holding on to her words for months and maybe will forever.)
Right now the plan is for him to come and live with us starting in the summer and to finish high school in New York. He loves New York. Over the Christmas holiday he and I and the kids did many things together while Husbandrinka worked and we had a great time. It was fun and we laughed a lot, but we were also very much on vacation. I worry about the every day. I worry about what it will be like to parent a teenager, even a fabulous one. I worry that he’s such a fantastic kid that it’s up to me to fuck up.
I think back to what it was like to be pregnant--and I remember someone telling me that the reason that the gestation period is nine months is so that parents can get used to the fact that they are going to have a child, and somehow come to grips with this monumental change. (I always thought it was so that the embryo can develop and grow, but I’m not like a scientist or anything). And the weird thing is that for the past year my heart has been getting ready to parent another child. I’m almost there.
Blog reading is a heavy duty commitment. So I'm taking Wordless Wednesday up a notch and introducing Commentless Wednesday. Every once in a while I will post something a little different from what I normally post and I will close comments and that takes all the pressure off you to respond. So, here it is--pressure free blog reading (there will be a quiz on Friday.)
I have a 14 year old stepson who lives in Europe with his mother. I’ve known my husband’s son since he was two years old and the first few years, I’m ashamed to admit, I would stick my tongue out at him whenever I was relatively confident that I was unobserved. I was single and I didn’t have children and I couldn’t help but feel jealous about the obvious bond that pre-Husbandrinka had with his ex. They had a son, and he was adorable. I kept a journal back then, one of those pretentious leatherbound volumes that I am always too intimidated to write in, but the one thing that I did manage to scratch a few months after I got married was “my husband has a son. He is not my son, not even a little bit.” I think about that sometimes. Look, if you had a pretentious journal, you’d be all pretentious about it too.
He visited us a few times every year and his father went to visit him a few times more. As he got older, our relationship evolved around the fact that we have a very similar sense of humor. We all went to Paris last spring and he couldn’t stop laughing at my utter inability to speak French. I think he first thought that I was sort of faking and then he must have assumed that it was some form of a learning disability.
Because there were five of us (me, Husbandrinka, our two kids and my stepson) and the Parisians are neo-Nazis when it comes to the three person per cab maximum, we would split into two cabs routinely. I would often seek to be in a cab with him, not only because he had a cell phone that worked in Paris but also because he could speak French to the driver and translate my anxiety.
“Where is he taking us?” I asked him one day when the cab driver did a complete U-turn and started driving us away from our destination, racing down the Princess Diana Boulevard of Death. “Let him know that if he’s planning on dismembering us and throwing our remains into the Siene that President Bush will not think twice about adding France to the axis of evil.” He laughed. But for some reason refused to translate.
His mother is sick. She will not get better. I went to see her last year and had a very Lifetime Television for Women moment and told her that I would take care of her son as though he were my own child. She thanked me. She said that he loves coming to New York because I am so nice to him. (She is incredibly gracious and always has been. Thanks a lot for not giving me any evil ex fodder. And yes, I realize that he loves coming to New York because it’s NEW YORK CITY! And not because I know some really good knock-knock jokes, but I’ve been holding on to her words for months and maybe will forever.)
Right now the plan is for him to come and live with us starting in the summer and to finish high school in New York. He loves New York. Over the Christmas holiday he and I and the kids did many things together while Husbandrinka worked and we had a great time. It was fun and we laughed a lot, but we were also very much on vacation. I worry about the every day. I worry about what it will be like to parent a teenager, even a fabulous one. I worry that he’s such a fantastic kid that it’s up to me to fuck up.
I think back to what it was like to be pregnant--and I remember someone telling me that the reason that the gestation period is nine months is so that parents can get used to the fact that they are going to have a child, and somehow come to grips with this monumental change. (I always thought it was so that the embryo can develop and grow, but I’m not like a scientist or anything). And the weird thing is that for the past year my heart has been getting ready to parent another child. I’m almost there.
posted by Marinka at
12:01 AM
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