Stepdog (13 page)

In the car, meanwhile, the rest of us waited.

But I couldn't help loving Jim for loving Eddie. He was a serious guy, a serious journalist, talking endlessly about nuclear weapons policy or criminal justice reform, and then, there he was, smitten with this strange creature.

A creature-thing that startled me when he sidled up to me one morning while I sat on the plush carpet in my office, paying bills.

“Eddie! What do you want?”

He had breached the off-limits area and he looked scared. I heard Jim whistling and realized he was chasing the dog around the house to give him a bath. Eddie hated water. In his desperate effort to hide from Jim, he tried to cozy up on my lap, his front paws on my chest as he wriggled his butt into position. His whimpers only got louder as Jim approached.

“Right here!” Jim commanded, trying to get him out to the driveway, where canine baths were dispensed. “Hey, get over here!”

The whimpers reached operatic notes as I pushed Eddie away. “Forget it, buddy.” He then resorted to his most loathsome trick: rolling on his back to spread his legs and let out a little arc of pee. On my carpet.

“Get him out of here, please!” I begged Jim.

My husband picked him up and carried him out like a squirming sack of potatoes. “You big galoot.”

I got to the kitchen to get a towel and some cleaner, but when I heard Jim turn on the water, I raced outside so I wouldn't miss one of my favorite shows: “Five Minutes of Misery in Eddie's Charmed Life.” The comedy was always the same, but I never tired of it.

“Is that so bad?” Jim asked as his dog stood in the driveway, getting soaped up with a sad and defeated face.

Eddie looked genuinely anguished, but I felt not a bit of compassion.

“I don't think so. See? It's a hot day. I'm going to soak you up. No! Don't you dare shake! No shaking! We're going to get nice and clean.”

Jim scrubbed so vigorously he was almost out of breath.

“A little scratch there. A little scratch before that ear. You're going to smell sweet for a change, right? Whoa! No shaking! Okay, getting close. Homestretch. There you go, there you go. Right? See? Don't look so unhappy.”

Eddie attempted to bolt, but Jim grabbed him in time. “Don't even think of getting on the grass. Now you shake. Now comes the good part. This is the part you like. A full-body scratch with the towel.”

Over, and under, and around. Then the final step: brushing. The bath was done in less than ten minutes.

“Good doggie, Eddie. You're such a good boy.”

I smiled as the job was finished and Eddie didn't look any more appealing. But Jim looked adorable. He was such a good daddy.

And such a rock in the middle of turmoil. In the thick of the recession of the late 2000s, the
San Francisco Chronicle
was going through a big financial squeeze, with layoffs and buyouts, and they had eliminated Jim's position. My husband was forced to take a buyout and look for another job, again. He turned to magazines and lined up freelancing assignments for
Mother Jones
and others to write about the California prison system and President George W. Bush's efforts to restart the nation's long-neglected nuclear weapons complex. He also spent several months as a researcher and writer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, working on a project on the prospects for coal production and clean coal technology.

•   •   •

H
e knew he had me to lean on, both emotionally and financially, if it came to that. He knew I loved him and would support his career choices.

Still, we needed a professional, at hourly rates of two hundred to three hundred dollars, to intervene. We found our first shrink specializing on stepfamilies through a friend of Jim's. I was nervous at first but soon relaxed sitting on the couch with Jim by my side. A good forty minutes of the hourly session were spent going over our backgrounds. Then we dug in, speaking of our conflict in neutral tones, sounding like the articulate, reasonable people we had each married. But after a few sessions, Therapist #1 concluded that our problem was communication. Excuse me? I thought our problem was that we disagreed on parenting issues and couldn't find common ground. Jim felt it was something in between. He believed there were communication issues, that we were talking past each other.

The therapist gave us exercises. “When you tell her something, ask her to repeat what you just said to make sure she listened, and vice versa.”

Okeydokey. It sounded so reasonable. In the middle of an argument, though, the exercise came off as patronizing and made us angrier.

“Are you listening to me?” I asked during a fight. “Repeat what I just said.”

“I'm not going to repeat what you just said.”

“Repeat it!”

After several sessions of discussing communication skills, Jim and I had both had it with Therapist #1. We had fallen into a pattern. We nodded in agreement and left his office feeling hopeful. The session was terrific, we both felt the therapist had guided us to a better place. But by the time we reached the parking lot, it was obvious we each had just heard the part about what the other person had to change. Another three hundred dollars wasted.

I got the name of another therapist from another stepmom I met by chance. She suggested going at it solo. “He will tell you how to protect yourself,” she told me, jotting down the guy's name and number. “He saved my life.”

Therapist #2 was older, a more fatherly figure. I went and he listened. I told him Jim was a wonderful husband and father. I told him sometimes I berated myself for not letting it go at that. Here I was being a nag when he was pursuing the noble goals of fatherhood. But I couldn't help feeling the way I was feeling. The bottom line for me was that my husband didn't trust me as co-chair of the family board and that I didn't feel comfortable in my own home. My husband's children were not mine to even hug and kiss without it feeling like I was overstepping or that there would be repercussions. With the kids, too much affection could trigger parental loyalty issues; too much control could trigger rebellion against the father's wife trying to take over. With Jim, too much assertiveness just triggered another fight. I told him this was the thing about stepmothering: when all was said and done, the kids still weren't yours.

But in the end, I told Therapist #2, our different approaches to raising a family were not as much the issue as Jim's belief that he could juggle the roles of father and husband separately, as though there were two Jims. It felt to me as if he had tried to build a wall between these two people, hoping perhaps that the rest of us wouldn't notice, or wouldn't mind. I understood that Jim was under an array of crushing pressures as a divorced father. I so wanted to help him. But, even so, I was given no responsibility and reaped no reward.

I didn't stop talking for almost the whole hour. Therapist #2 nodded empathetically and seemed to agree with me on everything. Then he talked, and I listened.

Session 1: The takeaway: “Stay in the hurt.” Hurt is better than anger.

Session 2: When having a talk, ask Jim to repeat what I just said to make sure he heard me. (Ugh).

Session 3: Make “I” statements only. “I” feel like an outsider, not a real partner. “I” feel that you humor me when you say you share my goals and will try to do better next time.

Session 4: When making amends, say I'm sorry and shut up. Do not follow with “if” or “but.”

Session 5: Ask “what” and “how” questions, not “why.” “What happened?” “How can I help you?”

Session 6: Forgive.

Session 7: Be gentle and warm. Try to get along, not to be right.

Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy, the shrink asked. Happy, I wanted to scream.

“Define your role,” the shrink said. “What do you want to be—a stepmother or just Mia? In the meantime, be yourself. Show them a different way. Give them love, the real power you have. No one can fight against that.”

Did I have it in me? Why was I so unyielding on issues of authority and respect? The bottom line was that Arielle and Henry were both good kids. But it was such a visceral reaction. Jim suspected there was something else eating at me. He was afraid I might be feeling cheated out of having my own children. When we met, we discussed adopting our own child but never followed through. We were young enough to consider having our own children, but we had so much on our plate in those first few years. Relocation, change of jobs for both of us, remarriage, new-family dynamics. I reassured him that was not it, and it really wasn't. It could have been an amazing experience for us, but neither one of us wanted it badly enough to pursue it and I was at peace with that. If anything cheated me out of having children it was coming of age in the 1970s, when the feminist message to ambitious young women was to plan a career, not motherhood.

So what was it? Didn't I love my husband enough to follow his lead? I was so confused. And scared. In a recurring nightmare, I'm single again after Jim and I have called it quits. I'm distraught. “How could I have fucked it up?” I ask myself in the dream. When I wake up, I have to wipe my face of cold tears.

I abandoned Therapist #2 and looked for someone to tell me point-blank that I was wrong. I found her through a website for blended families—Sheena, my very own stepmom life coach. For sixty dollars an hour, my coach would help me resolve conflicts, deal with the emotional baggage, and reach my goal of a harmonious home.

Our phone sessions felt like a breath of fresh air.

“It's important for you to remember that your level of concern does not match your ability to act,” no-nonsense Sheena told me. “Jim is driving the bus and even though you're a front-seat passenger and can help determine the direction of the bus, ultimately Jim is the driver.”

Rise above the day-to-day details and the minutiae, Sheena ordered me.

“Ignore the things that are none of your business, or can't be fixed or influenced by you anyway, and focus on the prize, which is your marriage.”

Will do!

The next time I sat at the dinner table and one or the other kid, or their father, acted out in a manner that would have made my mother reach for her flyswatter, I tried to imagine I was the neighbor, just visiting for a meal, and this had nothing to do with me. I reminded myself that a stepmother is not the mother. I repeated, like a mantra, the advice of my many advisers: I was to be more like a consultant. Resist the urge to lecture or correct. Speak up only to reinforce the positive. Wear your poker face. But I couldn't. I felt like I was about to explode. It was so against my nature, my gut, to just sit there. This was my family too, and I wanted to see success. I wanted to grab everybody by the shoulders and shout: “Do it my way! You're all headed for the cliff!”

But not even Eddie was agreeable. In fact, in the middle of all the tension, Eddie just wore me down. Just now I forgot to close the door to my office and found him comfortably laid out on my Italian designer love seat. My first thought: What could I do to this filthy dog without getting arrested? I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him down and out of the office in one strong sweep.

Jim heard the commotion and came down to get his dog.

“He's completely untrustworthy,” I said.

Eddie got on his hind legs to put two paws on my belly, as if to say “I'm sorry.” Jim melted. I acknowledged the sudden act (show) of contrition and tap-tap-tapped Eddie's head, but I was skeptical. Even when I reached out to him now, seeing an opening, he stepped back, cringing at my touch, jerking back his head as if I had burned him with cigarettes or beat him with a stick all his life. When I grabbed his head, insisting on petting him, he stood still for three seconds before he pulled back little by little, as if he couldn't stand my touch.

“E-weirdo, why don't you love me?”

That night, he followed me to the kitchen as I fetched a glass of water before going to bed. In the dark and quiet kitchen his eyes glistened, like the dog in
Children of the Corn
, and I hurried back upstairs just in case he decided to finally attack.

Was I going batty? I never brought up the dog during therapy sessions—at three hundred dollars an hour,
that
would have been crazy. I still had friends for that. They listened for free.

“Jim just uses his junkyard dog to disappear when he doesn't want to talk,” I complained to my friend Lynn over drinks at a tapas bar near the
Times
bureau. “In the middle of an argument he always gets this urge to walk Eddie and it's ‘See you later.'”

Lynn, who lived in New York but traveled to L.A. often to see family, didn't like Eddie either. She was a cat person. After Jim and I met, she was among the girlfriends who told me I was obsessing too much about the dog.

“I worry that, here you've met a great guy, and the dog is going to fuck it up.”

When Lynn and Eddie finally met after I moved to California, I asked for her assessment.

“I thought he'd be filthy dirty because of the way you described him. I expected him to have yellow drool and sharp teeth and red eyes and be farting all the time. But he's very clean.”

Yet Lynn was still firmly in my corner.

“Of course you're upset,” she now told me at the tapas bar as she speared a bacalao croquette with a toothpick. “They are running roughshod over you.”

Thanks, honey.

•   •   •

O
ne night as I lay in bed, I felt my chest tighten strangely. I tried to relax and fall asleep, but for the next few days I was conscious of this odd pressure in my chest. It felt like a strap was pulled tight across it and at times it even hurt a little. I told Jim and he acted calm, but he was a little alarmed and urged me to see a doctor. When I finally got myself checked out, it turned out that all was well. But whether the pain was real or imagined, I felt my body was sending me a message: I can't take it anymore. I was tired of walking on eggshells. I was tired of schedules that I knew little, if anything, about: vacation plans, decisions about whether Arielle was ready to learn to drive or whether Henry could have a drum set in the house. I was the consultant no one consulted. My efforts to try to disengage, to compartmentalize, weren't working—my chest was telling me that much. Maybe I should have cried more. Jim left me reassuring, loving notes on the kitchen table. He bought me flowers. My husband was my life, my support, my adviser, my lover, my love—I would never renounce him. But I reached the conclusion that we couldn't live together.