A Wooden Spoon {and choosing happiness}

I recall a time, long ago, when I had a young child and a new baby and my life was wrapped up in all the various things that accompanied childrearing.  I felt like my time of going through hard things had ended. The season of fighting cancer and nearly dying and all the things I had faced up to that point had somehow afforded me the luxury of some stillness. And I was grateful.

I piddled around the house. I made up songs with my little girl which made us both laugh and watched my son pick flowers. I wrote on my blog and plugged away at my novel.  I’d make videos of my children saying “I love you daddy” and focus on cooking dinner. My therapist said this was my emotional immaturity phase, where life hadn’t really hit yet.  I just called it happy. 

I used to bake bread every Monday. I used the same wooden spoon every time, the fat rounded one that grabbed the flour up and turned it over. A friend told me to cover my dough bowl with hot tea towels, and I would rub bread dough with water to form a harder crust. I loved every part of it, from the smell of the yeast granules to the way the molasses ran down the heap of sticky dough like dark rivers, to the moment I pulled it out of the oven and my children came rushing over, asking for butter.  I loved every part of motherhood also, where I’d make a tree out of paper and words on little apples, and I’d sit with my daughter and we’d pin the words on the tree.  Sometimes I’d just let my son fall asleep on my chest and wouldn’t move for hours for fear of waking him. 

But as life goes, you can be blindsided.  It was as if one minute I was driving to the grocery store to get a pot roast for dinner and I wake up in a ditch wrapped up in metal. I never thought the person and family I poured all my trust into would take it all so lightly, and that my guts would be ripped out onto the pavement. The whole life I knew had an undercurrent of lies, a layer of which I was blissfully unaware. I remember curling up in my closet so my children wouldn’t see me and I’d sob into dirty clothes piled on the floor.  My mother came and stayed with us for a while.  She would bring me buttered toast, begging me to eat.  I lost twenty pounds. I didn’t care, really.  I felt like I had lost everything.

But somehow I knew I had the power to survive. God had woven inside of me an inner strength to continue.  So I picked myself up and put on lipstick.  I got a job and climbed back into my power suits.  I made my own money and created my own savings account. I used to wear heels until they made my toes cramp. I would walk strongly down the hallway. My kids depended on me being okay, happy, successful, making it. 

I didn’t have the luxury of playing the victim.

And when I surfaced, I realized that the life I was living before wasn’t real.  It was like a fairy tale with a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the love I thought I had and the marriage I invested so much in was simply a projection of what I wanted it to be.  I had to find my footing. I got a nanny and I met friends for happy hours and I started to write again.  I ended up starting my own law firm and spent every free second I had with my children.  We would have dance parties in our socks and I’d braid my daughter’s hair, and my son always found a way to make me laugh.  And I cooked and cooked and cooked, as that became my outlet for anxiety. Which is how my children came to love caramelized onion tarts and coq a vin. 

One day in New York, I met a handsome man who is to this day the smartest person I’ve ever known.  He looked right inside of me.  Stories just poured out as he nodded and smiled with those sea green eyes. The world around us faded, and we were the last one to leave in every restaurant.  I was, truth be told, completely infatuated with this new type of love. It seemed mature, grounded, solid. It wasn’t based on a shared history or children, or years hunkering down in college eating cheap pasta or getting through school or punching each other to get up and feed the baby.  It was just easy. He made me feel hundred percent seen and beautiful. 

Four years later, one of the happiest days of my life was marrying this man, as I walked down the aisle to a Christmas song, in a tastefully decorated barn filled with candles and old books and wine.  I had found a friend, a partner, someone with whom I could be myself. We thought four years of dating had prepared us for what was to come. He was kind to my children.  I enjoyed getting to know his. Finally, after a searing wound, I’d found the salve that I was looking for. I had been blessed with complete restoration.

Well, it turns out that when a vessel breaks and is glued back together, there are some cracks.  One crack is that the children that I bore do not belong to this new man I fell in love with.  So the complication arises of dealing with their father.  And my stepchildren are in a different phase of life, with traditions and stories that do not always match my own.  On top of that, stepmothers face all kinds of strange and weird emotions from stepchildren; some simply embrace you more than others.  They either think “well this lady’s pretty nice” or “she’s not my mother and if she makes me one more Happy Wednesday card and leaves flowers in my room one more fucking time I’m gonna gut her in her sleep.” 

So, you know.  It can be challenging.

The disjointed nature of a blended family is difficult.  One moment you think you are making progress, then the realization hits that you’ve barely taken a step. Or you’ve gone backwards.  You can’t tell from day to day whether any love or energy or time you’ve invested in this new family even makes one tiny bit of difference.  And the goofiness that your own children find entertaining, or the lazy habits you tolerate, or the traditions you have developed as your own little team, are not as accepted on the outside. I’ll never forget the year I introduced my stepchildren and husband to my annual “Thomas Jefferson biscuits,” which are sweet potato pecan biscuits I make every Fall that my children love and beg for, and they just shrugged.

So instead of pinning words on a paper tree and baking bread on Mondays, I’m now trying to navigate this new landscape that is exceedingly more complicated. I always feel that I’m the outsider, the one who stepped in, and the one who in a moment could be out again. You make dinner and listen to their stories and wrap their birthday gifts and throw them parties, but you don’t know if you’ll ever be family.  In fact, there is a gnawing dread that you never will.  

I am human, and at times had no idea what to do or say.  Sometimes, I do or say the wrong things. In an effort to ease tension, sarcasm backfires.  I lose my temper or go around demanding that things need to change around here. Eventually, I learned to step out of the line of fire, remove my hand from hot plates, and back away. I didn’t expect all the land mines.

There is a lot of holding back in this story.  Holding back my opinions. Holding back my intentions. At times, holding back my gifts and talents.  Holding back the truth of the past from my own children. And holding back my very own heart, for fear of it being injured again. The hardest for me, a woman of words, is holding my tongue.

What I did hold on to, despite it all, was that wooden spoon. This arm has cranked out many a batch of things.  Muffins, brownies, biscuits, it doesn’t matter really.  It’s not even what I cook that counts.  It’s the fact that I have control over something that turns out well.  It ends with a product that 2 out of 5 people in this house like, but every time it seems to be a different person so that’s fun.  And every night when I cook dinner, I hear “OMG why the heavens are there so many sides.” Because making savory bread pudding with mushroom and gruyere is what is saving me right now.

Sometimes my husband reminds me to look at all the wonderful things. He’s right, of course. And believe me, there are wonderful things.  The new family slowly develops traditions of its own.  The children you did not birth begin to recognize a few things they actually like about you. They ask you for an opinion.  They text you when they are scared.  They actually come to you when they are low.  They say your BLT is the best they have ever had.  They miss you. And your children start to recognize your partner as someone who is helpful to them, and loyal, and uses a whole bunch of puns.  But mostly, someone who is not afraid of questions, or failure, and is exceedingly kind.  And you are not alone.  Every night you have a person to talk to and laugh with. A wonderful person you are proud of.

And slowly, there is hope.  Not only do you start to create a home, but a place where you can breathe despite the insanity of this mixed bunch. I realize now that the hard parts of people have always been hard and have nothing to do with me personally.  My girlfriends allow me to pick them up in the middle of the day to get coffee or meet for drinks when I desperately need a friend to laugh with. I allow myself to put myself first at times, say no, or just do things exclusively with my own children without any apology.

I go out to the garden when I feel weak in spirit.  I sit with God and tell him I am sorry for being so silent.  I’m growing vegetables in a garden bed with a scarecrow, even though my son points out that “we don’t exactly have a real crow problem around here.”  In the evening I shut up the chicken coop to protect the hens from harm. I peer out the back deck at the endless sea of hills and realize we are in the middle of some of the most beautiful Texas Hill Country that ever was.  I bake brownies from scratch and text my stepdaughter to come over after school and test them.  She lets me steal a hug. I text my stepson in college about majors and life issues and he always responds and puts up with me. He tells me happy mother’s day even thought I’m fully aware I’m not his mother. I curl up next to my son and wait until he is asleep, as he says that by me just sitting there, he feels safe and happy. And my thirteen-year-old yearns for me at times and hates me at times, as all children that age do.  But she still calls me mommy at night, when she isn’t around her friends, and when she hugs me she holds on and it lingers.  I notice. I don’t let go first.  I wash the dishes and put the spoon back in its crockery holder where it belongs.

As it turns out, this is also where I belong.

As the evening draws to a close, I wait for my husband’s call, every time he’s out of town, like clockwork.  If he is here, we cuddle on the couch. His voice is patient, loving, kind.  He asks me about my day and listens to all my stories and always gives me his full attention.  He tells me about all his meetings and the people he meets.  It’s like we are interwoven together and we have become as enthralled with each other as two people can be. After all these years, when something good or bad happens I instantly reach for the phone to tell him. And our favorite thing to do is travel together, so we’ve decided this next year we would make that a priority. 

Sometimes I look up to God and think “You have a good sense of humor.  This is complete insanity.”

But this is my life, a big complicated ball of hot mess blended with love and stubbornness and creativity and adventure and decorating and baking and living. I am one to iron the napkins, set a beautiful table, decorate with specificity.  It makes me happy, so I stop apologizing for it. I suppose this is emotional maturity. Life is good because I choose for it to be good.  There is a fork in the road, one leading toward victimization and looking back at a rewritten past where things seemed more glorious than they were, or another where I can squarely look in the face of ugly things and the broken things and hard things, but also wonderful things too, and I walk down that pathway willingly.

I choose joy. Thank you Jesus, for putting friends in my world that make me laugh wild big belly laughs.  Thank you for loving me so much despite it all.  Thank you for a husband who proves to be loyal and honest through years of reassurance and patience with me.  Thank you for my parents who love me with a full rich love and gave me a stable childhood that allows me the luxury of optimism.

And in time, I learn what works and what does not work. And I learn to walk away from certain things too. Which means I’m growing.

In a way, it’s nice to be outside the bubble.  I can see the good and bad in people. I am not as shocked when things hurt as I can see them coming, and I heal quicker. I understand why people are broken, the background that creates such a void, the gratefulness I feel and the beauty of forgiveness.  I see what sadness lives inside of people, and I know I cannot fix it.  I can only pray harder, listen more. I see the emptiness that comes without faith, and it reminds me what joy there is in submission.  And at times, I even stand up more for myself and create my own joy, my own space to breathe, and my own beauty.

It’s not a fairy tale, but it’s a damn good story.  One that’s worth writing and living.  One that is worth telling.  And in time, worth laughing about. As for today, I’m making blueberry muffins with a crumble topping, and kissing my children on their foreheads, and screaming at them to have a HAPPY DAY as they jump out of the car in the carpool line while they pretend to ignore me. My daughter just rolls her eyes, which makes me laugh.  I texted my stepdaughter that I put points in her bagel account with a local bagel shop, and her response was SICK YOU ROCK. My husband is making us reservations for a food tour this weekend because he knows I’ll love it, and I’m looking at an orchid he gave me to set on my desk when he was gone for a few days because that brings me joy. 

I love my life, all the various wonderful and broken parts. Because I choose to love it, and that makes all the difference.