Oct. 9 of 31 Days

October 9th, In Which I Get Crazy Real About Being A Stepmom

I'm a stepmom. She'll be 15 next month, and as of the end of August, she now lives in CA with her mom and is going to high school out there.

She's one lost little girl, with no idea of who she is or where she wants to go, except that she knows she wants people to love her. But she wants them to love the GOOD her...not the real her. Not the her that needs healing. I think she'd like to forget about that her. But she can't. So she invents stories about what she's going through to tell her friends to garner pity. Her dad and I know The Real Her. She doesn't. I don't know who else does. I'm betting a lot of people in our church do. She's a pretty good stunt woman, but she's not that great an actress.

Before she left, we finally consented to letting her have a Facebook account. You have email, we said. You'll have your mom's phone to text, we said. You can get people's addresses and write them letters, we said. But we let her have an account anyway. (It was funny, actually -- we led her to believe we were saying no, but then, under the cloud of all those warnings why we didn't want her to have one, we said yes. She was ecstatic. And very shortly thereafter, I think she forgot all those reasons.)

Now she's . . . "enjoying her freedom," I call it. Her mom isn't as strict conservative as we are with rules. Her mom has said she's a Christian, but if you know Christians by their actions . . . well, I'm not judging, I'm just saying I wouldn't guess she is. And when we asked her mom to make sure she gets SL to church, she said, "well, I don't want to force her to go . . . " Thanks for nothing.

SL is in God's hands, we know that. And we know He has a big huge GIANT plan for her life. It's gonna be amazing. Fireworks and stuff. But we know it's going to be hard to watch her go through the junk she's gonna have to go through to get to the awesomeness.

For instance . . .
. . . I can't comment too much on her Facebook page because she gets mad at what I say, no matter how happy I make it.
. . . the only times she calls me specifically is if she needs something (her dog was biting at her, she wanted to get a spot out of her shirt, etc.).
When you think about these things, they sound marvelously like "mom stuff" . . . but I'm not the mom. She's made that clear. So I stand back, and take it.

And for instance, I think, "hey . . . her Facebook wall has been pleasantly calm the last several weeks; I'll peek into her messages and make sure everything's going okay with her."

**This is not snooping, FYI. This was a known-to-all-parties-involved part of the Having a Facebook Deal. So me signing in to check things out is no breach of trust or confidence or privacy.**

And I read things like "bulimic." And I read various and sundry swears and inappropriateness that I won't re-print.

Sigh. And ALL I WANT TO DO is complain to another stepmom about it. I want a stepmom Bible study. I want a stepmom book. A stepmom website.

And I know that community is a God-given gift, but what I KNOW is that God can be and needs to be all. I. need.

I want Jesus in human form. I don't believe He's going to grant my request.

So I will continue yelling at Him, and trying to pray for her, and trying to be honest with Him, and trying to convince myself that all this is not futile. And trying really hard NOT to flat out say she can't come back if this is how she's going to act. And I will try to figure out the best time to tell her dad these things. Because even if I do tell him these words that I've seen, he will call her, and she will probably deny it with some odd reason or excuse or some new story.

And I don't want to think about it. Anymore. At all. Ever.
My reality = sometimes I want to sign off.
Stepmoms know.
Don't judge.

I'm just being crazy real.