(Step) Mother’s Day

Author’s note:  This post is dedicated to Julie, Patti and Amy- my three step daughters of twenty years. Terrific women all.

We’ve all read the depressing statistics.  The divorce rate in the United States hovers around 50% these days. And that’s only for first marriages.  It is much higher when it comes to second and third ones.  Mongolia has the lowest.  (It’s official, folks.  My next wedding will be held in the Gobi desert.  Friends, start practicing your camel-riding.)

But with half the marriages down the tubes, it’s a cinch that some of you readers are step parents- or step children.  Or both.  A tricky path to tread- one filled with land mines of every emotionally-devastating description.  But today I want to explore the lighter side of the topic.

I became a step mom when I was twenty-five and the girls were fifteen, eleven and nine.  I’ll never forget the night we took them out to dinner and their dad broke the impending wedding news.

Julie, the oldest, frowned and asked, “Why can’t you just live together?”

Patti, the middle sister, asked, “Does this mean you’re not buying that RV and we’re not going camping?”

And the baby, Amy, too dismayed to speak, looked like someone had just run over her puppy.

I wasn’t offended by their adverse reaction.  Ours had been a whirlwind romance and they had only seen me twice before.  It was quite a shock, I’m sure.

But they were very nice girls- and so was I- and we all got along.  It’s funny, looking back on it now, but I didn’t feel daunted, intimidated or jealous about this sudden expansion in my new nuclear family. Maybe I was too dumb to know any better.  I just wasn’t worried.

Patti needn’t have worried about that aborted RV, trip, either.  True, her father did not buy the giant, tricked-out camper that they had all been drooling over, but we all did go on a road trip to Aspen for our honeymoon.

That Colorado-bound car trip:  I had painstakingly made a great picnic of fried chicken, devilled eggs, and chocolate chip cookies that was specifically earmarked for somewhere in Iowa. After we left our Chicago apartment and picked up the girls at their mother’s house, my husband pulled up their block and they unpacked it and ate it right there.

It was ten a.m.  We had not even left the suburbs yet.  So much for planning.  And a valuable object lesson in parenting of any kind.  You plan.  The kids laugh.

Aspen was cool and the girls had a swell time.  (I taught Patti how to play poker, as I recall.)  Many years later, when Patti herself got married, I asked if I could come along on her nifty European honeymoon. She was surprised.

“Why would you want to come on my honeymoon?” she asked.

“Because you came on mine,” was my logical rejoinder.

But it was still no dice.

When they entered high school, both Patti and Amy moved in with us.  We lived in the great New Trier school district and their mother, though completely devoted, was working and couldn’t keep the eagle eye on them that all teenagers require.

Nick was just born in April, and Patti touched down that same August and thus I had a full house with two infants nineteen months apart and a teenager.  Lots to oversee, but it was fun.  And all the kids really liked each other, thank goodness.

Although that didn’t stop baby Natasha from ratting out her beloved big sister “Paki,” as she called her.  One day, Natasha- who really never spoke until she was almost three- wandered into my bedroom, picked up a pen, and held it back and forth from her mouth, exhaling with artful sophistication.

“Paki,” she announced.

I jumped.

“Patti smokes?” I cried.

The little narc nodded sweetly.

And can we talk about sixteen?  That critical age.  The age of boys, hormones, and drivers’ licenses.  Which brings me to one of my most vivid memories of all my step motherhood.

The Driver’s Ed course at New Trier was full up when she needed to take it, so I enrolled Patti in a private driving school course.  Adams.

Established in 1946, they had taught more North Shore teenagers to drive than Steve Gersten.  (Newbies, see my November 1, 2012 post “There He Was Just A-walkin’ Down The Street” if you don’t get this reference.)

Patti was an enthusiastic student and a very good driver, and she passed the course handily.  Then she sat back and waited for the white slip or pink slip or some kind of permit to come so she could take her driving test and get that most prized of all teenaged possessions- her very own license.

Day after day, she eagerly went through the mail searching for that permit.  Day after day, nothing.  Weeks went by, and thoroughly frustrated by now, she called some of her fellow Adams-ites and asked if they had gotten that precious slip of paper.

They had.  They all had.

“I don’t understand it,” she wailed to me.  “Why haven’t they sent me my permit?  Adams sent them out weeks ago to everyone else in the class but me.  Can you call them, Ellen?”

“Wait a minute,” I was starting to break out in a cold sweat.  “Are you telling me the school sends out the permit?  Not the Secretary of State’s office?”

“Yeah, Adams send it out. Why?”

OH MY GOD.  (No OMG will do here.)  From the time Patti had enrolled in that place, we had been bombarded with mail from them.  Circulars and flyers all touting special discount deals for anyone who wanted to learn how to drive.  My mailbox had been crammed for weeks with their junk mail.  Over the course of her course, I had simply thrown it all out.  Unopened.

Looking into her pitiful, adorable, shining, expectant sixteen year old face and confessing my crime, (tossing out unopened mail.  The last time I ever did that in my life, believe me.) was the hardest thing I had to do as a step parent to date.  Maybe ever.

“I was expecting it to come from the state of Illinois.  Or the Secretary of State’s office.  Not the school.  I don’t know how to tell you this, Patti.  I must have thrown it out.  I am so sorry.”

I have to give her credit.  She didn’t waste time berating me.  Once the magnitude of my crime sunk in, she took immediate action.

She jumped on her bike, hightailed it over to the Willow Road landfill, and combed the dump looking for our garbage.

To no avail of course.  But that’s how much that piece of paper meant to her.

I was busy, too.  I got on the horn and found out that she could not take the drivers test without that actual piece of paper.  A new one could be re-issued only after six months had elapsed.  An eternity to a broken-hearted driver-to-be and her very guilty step mom.

I then made another call to a very “connected” friend of mine.  (He’s dead now, so don’t bother me with requests to fix tickets or anything.)  Luckily for all of us, corruption in the driver’s license bureau was rife. He gave me a name of someone who could “take care of it.”

Patti and I went down to Elston Avenue in Chicago to find the fixer in the DMV.  He had been brought up to speed on the “no actual physical permit” situation and had agreed to turn a blind eye.

If you think your kid was nervous taking his/her driver’s test, you should have seen Patti.  Any minute, she fully expected us both to be arrested and dragged to jail.  But shaking all the way, she still passed with flying colors.  Despite all the catcalls both she, (terribly pretty) and my Jaguar XJ6L (ditto) got from the motley crew on hand at that driver’s facility.

But for years, Patti was always terrified that somehow “they” would find out, and the driver’s police would take back her license.  She’s grown-up now, with teenaged drivers of her own, so I think the statute of limitations has safely elapsed here.

But there’s no time limit on warm memories about our kids.

No matter how we got them.

Happy Mother’s Day to you all.

May today be joyous.