Untethered

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “I’m sorry if I seem less than thrilled about them,” Sarah said. “I do love her thoughtfulness. I’m aware, though, that if only we could get her to work on her homework for a fraction of the time she worked on those cards, she wouldn’t need to come to tutoring. But Morgan is determined to do everything the hard way.”

  She picked up her daughter’s coat from a chair and frowned at a small mark on the collar. “That girl.” She licked a finger and rubbed the smudge, the same way she had done on Stevie’s chin. When the mark didn’t fade, she opened her purse and took out a package of wet wipes. Using one on the coat, she managed to coax the dirt into fading. With a satisfied nod, she draped the coat over the back of the chair. She arranged Morgan’s hat and mittens on the seat, then zipped up the girl’s backpack and set it beside, on the floor.

  She did the same for Stevie’s, shaking her head as she picked two tiny leaves out of the cuff of one of his mittens before making a tidy pile of the books he had brought with him. Char saw a momentary smile flicker on Sarah’s lips as the woman stood back and admired the neat collections of her children’s belongings.

  Char and Allie had driven Morgan home once, in the late fall. One of the community center workers had come into the waiting room, holding the center’s phone out to Char. Sarah was in the emergency room. Stevie had cut his forehead getting into the car and needed stitches. Dave was the only one at the garage and couldn’t leave. No problem, Char told her. She would take the girls out for a quick dinner and run Morgan home later.

  It took only a few minutes in the Crews’ foyer for Char to see that as fastidious as Sarah was about clothes and hair—hers and her children’s—she was equally so about her home. It looked like it was part of a model showcase, not the living space for a family with two young children. Not one stray toy lay on the living room floor. The place settings on the dining room table were immaculately arranged. The shoes on the mat in the hallway stood in perfect pairs.

  The foyer table wasn’t covered in dust or a random collection of junk like the Hawthorns’ hall table, but was home only to a neat stack of envelopes and a small ceramic dish that held a set of keys. Even the artwork in Sarah’s house didn’t dare hang at anything but obedient right angles.

  Now Sarah ran a flat palm over her head to smooth hair that wasn’t out of place. She turned from her children’s backpacks to Char, who was still trying to think of a way to respond to Sarah’s complaint about Morgan never wanting to do homework.

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to advise on how to get a child to change her behavior,” Char said, thinking about Allie, and how strained things had been between them. Char checked over her shoulder to be sure they were alone, then put a hand on Sarah’s arm. “I know how hurtful it is to put yourself out there for a child and have them not do the same.” Sarah didn’t appear to register, and Char said, “The hug. When they got let out.”

  Sarah let out a long breath. “She’s been doing that for the past few months. She’ll hug everyone but me. Tells her dad and her brother that she loves them, but won’t say it to me. And she’s been talking more than ever about her mom—seeing her again, going to find her, wondering when she’ll show up on our doorstep to pick Morgan up. I’m trying not to let on that it bothers me. But it’s not easy.”

  “No,” Char said. “It’s not.” The statement seemed to confuse Sarah. Char tapped an index finger to her chest. “Stepmom, remember?”

  “Oh, of course,” Sarah said. “But you and Allie seem so close. Not like the stories you always hear.”

  If you only knew, Char wanted to say. Instead, she said, “We had this honeymoon phase, me and Allie. Right after her father and I got married, I was her hero. I could do nothing wrong. She wanted to be with me constantly, gave me hugs just about every time she walked into a room and saw me. Asked me to tuck her in at night.

  “And then, after about six months or so, it all just . . . stopped. She went through a long stretch, maybe a year, where even though I was right there, doing everything for her, she was suddenly obsessed with her mother. Couldn’t stop talking about her, calling her on the phone, wondering out loud when she’d get to see her next. While not so much as patting me on the shoulder at night, let alone giving a good-night hug and kiss. It was . . .” she fished for a word that didn’t sound too dramatic, “challenging.”

  Sarah didn’t respond, but she was waiting, Char could tell, to hear more. Char glanced at her reflection in the windows and considered how much detail she should provide, which examples. There were so many to choose from.

  Like the time Char volunteered to bake four pies for the seventh-grade basketball team’s bake sale. Allie thanked her profusely, and in the next breath, she pleaded with her dad to drive her to the mall so she could buy something “really good” to send to Lindy for Mother’s Day the following week. She had sixty dollars in her wallet, and planned to spend it all on her mother. “Besides,” she told her dad, “there’s nothing fun to do at home, anyway. All Char’s going to be doing this afternoon is baking.”

  Or the afternoon Allie came running into the house whooping about the part she had gotten in a school play after Char had spent the previous two weeks helping her rehearse her lines and her singing. But when Char cheered and asked for details, Allie said she didn’t have time to fill her in right then, because she had to call her mom and let her know the good news.

  It was a truth sometimes hard for Char to bear that Lindy’s absence from Allie’s life was only physical. Emotionally, she had remained as much a part of Allie’s life as Bradley was. And more, it seemed, than Char was, or ever would be.

  That certain degree of politeness in step relationships, Char had learned, comes from emotional distance. A lack of shared biology, an incomplete history—one cut short at the beginning, not the end. Bradley had the ultimate prize that Char could never claim: the unwavering affection, devotion, and unconditional love of a child.

  So did Lindy, despite her disappearing act. On this issue, Char knew exactly what Sarah must struggle with each time she saw Morgan opening her Lifebook to gaze at that photo of the young woman in the lawn chair. Each time she heard the girl fantasize about the day her “real” mother would come looking for her.

  Char was the one who had labored to meet every requirement in the Motherhood job description, but Lindy was the one who claimed the title—when it was convenient to her. When it wasn’t, she loaned it, temporarily, to Char.

  “Char can go with you,” Lindy told eighth-grade Allie about a mother-daughter camping trip Lindy wasn’t interested in. “That’s the benefit of having two moms—when one’s away, the other one can fill in!” But when Allie had to write about her “mother” for a school assignment and floated out the idea of writing about both Char and Lindy, Lindy made it very clear that her daughter had one mother, and her paper had better not suggest otherwise.

  No matter how much Char did for the girl, Allie’s first thought, when it came to “mother,” was Lindy, not Char. If Char were held at gunpoint, she would ultimately confess that while Allie’s devotion to her father only made Char smile, the girl’s devotion to Lindy had sometimes made Char’s chest tighten.

  She frowned at her reflection and decided not to burden Sarah with all of those details. “I thought about giving up,” she told Sarah instead. “I’m all about changing your situation if it’s not working, and giving up was one way to change my situation. I thought about deciding stepparenting wasn’t for me. Calling it quits with her father, moving back to D.C. Picking my life back up there.

  “I also thought about yelling at her, ‘I’m right here! Trying to love you! Why won’t you love me back!’ I thought about listing all the things I did for her on a daily basis, and reminding her that her mother wasn’t doing any of those things.” She winced at the memory and lifted her shoulders. “I obviously wasn’t particularly mature about it, or thick-skinned, or gracious, at the ti
me.”

  “Things seem to be pretty good between the two of you now,” Sarah said. “From my vantage point, anyway. I’ve wished I could be as close to Morgan as you are to Allie. So, I guess she came around, eventually?”

  “I don’t know if she did or not,” Char said, “but I know I did. I was complaining about it to Will one day. I was telling him how this wasn’t the relationship I was hoping for with my stepdaughter. I was telling him that I felt like a complete failure as a stepmom because of it. He had listened to me cry about it for ages, but I guess it finally got to him that day. And he said, ‘Since when was it supposed to be about what you wanted?’

  “It hit me then—well, my brother hit me with it, as he tends to do—that I needed to let Allie be the driver. To let her decide how close she wanted us to be, and how fast she wanted that to happen. If she didn’t want to be as close as fast as I did, I needed to be okay with that. And if she wanted to be close for a while, and then back off for a while, then I had to be fine with that, too. Not take it personally.

  “Once I started to do that—not just tell myself I’d do it, but once I really started to feel that way and act that way—things changed. Maybe we got closer, or maybe I just learned to appreciate how close we were on any given day, whether it was a day she confided all her secrets to me or a day she ran past me and went up to her room to phone her mom. Maybe my backing off allowed her to feel safe enough to get closer to me. Or maybe she and I are no closer than we ever were at our most distant, but I no longer care.

  “I stopped always hoping for more. I stopped feeling disappointed about what she and I didn’t have, and about the fact that there’s this other woman out there who she’ll always love more than me. I started looking at what we did have—lots of fun moments together, some really great conversations, even if they didn’t end in hugs or ‘I love you’s.

  “And I decided to find as much joy as I could from the things we did have together, instead of finding the sadness in the things we didn’t have. Anyway, I don’t know if any of that is helpful to you. Maybe it’s totally different, my situation compared to yours.”

  “Well, you are different, compared to me,” Sarah said. “I’m not nearly as strong as you. I don’t give myself ‘change your situation’ pep talks and tell myself to take charge. You’re more self-assured than I’ll ever be.”

  “That’s not remotely true,” Char said. “You’re raising two children who each have some significant challenges. That takes so much strength—”

  “You know what I’ve been thinking?” Sarah asked, interrupting. She glanced down the hall, leaned closer, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve been thinking that maybe God didn’t want me to be a mother. Maybe Morgan senses that, and that’s why she won’t embrace me like a mother.”

  “Sarah! Why on earth would you think that? You’re a wonderful—”

  “I had four miscarriages before I got pregnant with Stevie,” Sarah said. “Some people would get the hint. And then my pregnancy with him was awful. Bed rest, C-section, prenatal, perinatal, postnatal complications. You name it, I went through it. There wasn’t an easy thing about it. And now, he has these issues. When we talked about having a second child, we decided not to tempt fate by getting pregnant again.

  “So, we turned to adoption, and look what we have. A child desperate for love from the woman who didn’t want to be her mother, and not interested at all in love from the woman trying as hard as she can to be exactly that. Maybe this is God’s way of telling us He’s not impressed that we pursued having a family after He made it clear He didn’t think we deserved one.”

  “No! That’s not true at all! Of course you deserve—”

  “It’s funny,” Sarah said. “Or maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the right word. Ironic? But at church, I’m seen as one of the go-to authorities on raising children. Dave, too. The Crews: parents of the year, perfect family, adoption success story. As if.”

  “You are hardly an adoption failure story, just because your child is going through an unaffectionate stage,” Char said.

  “You and I both know that’s not the only issue we have,” Sarah said. She let out a long breath. “If you could have heard us, for that first year, before Stevie turned four and they realized his development wasn’t going like it should, and everything changed.

  “We’d stand there after the service, me and Dave, all smug, and people would come up and shake their heads and ask how we did it. How we got our kids to sit so quietly during the sermon, or act so nicely in Sunday School. And we’d nod and lap up the praise and tell them our many secrets to creating the ideal family. If they all only knew how less than ideal it is . . .”

  “How’s the other thing going, anyway?” Char asked, touching the inside of her arm to indicate she was talking about the self-harm. She frowned at herself after the question came out. She had asked Sarah about it several times before, only to hear that despite the counseling Dave was working so hard to provide for his daughter, they hadn’t been able to get Morgan to stop hurting herself. It felt mean to make Sarah repeat their lack of progress again now, on a day when she was already feeling bad about her skills as a parent. On the other hand, it would feel worse not to ask.

  Sarah put a palm against her cheek. “Not good at all. The other day, I found scissors in her room, and a box of Band-Aids.”

  “Oh, no!” Char put a hand to her throat. “You mean—”

  Sarah nodded. “Cutting. We’ve been trying everything we can think of. We found a new play therapy place and took her there, and when that didn’t work, we took her to one in Ann Arbor a few times. And of course we’re still taking her to her regular therapist. We’ve been reading everything we can get our hands on, and we’re trying all the things the books say to do and her therapist tells us to do.

  “We’re talking less about Stevie’s issues, too, to make that whole situation less stressful for her. And also to make sure she doesn’t think we’re more interested in him than her.” Sarah moved her hand from her cheek to her forehead, covering her eyes. “All of that, and it’s only gotten worse.”

  Char put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “What does her therapist say?”

  “He doesn’t know,” Sarah said. “He has theories, but no answer. It could be that the bruising stopped working for her as an emotional release, so she had to move to something more painful. But he can’t be sure. It’s so hard, dealing with an issue like this, where there’s no definite cause, no guaranteed treatment.

  “It would be so nice to hear, ‘Here’s exactly why she’s doing it, here’s exactly how to fix it, here’s exactly how long it will take.’ Better yet, ‘Give her these pills and she’ll be cured forever.’ Instead, we hear there’s no way to know exactly why she’s doing it. And there’s no guarantee that therapy will help.

  “Some people go to counseling all their lives and they don’t resolve the issues they went in for. Morgan has a long history of neglect. Who knows how long it could take for her to resolve her feelings about that? Who knows if she’ll ever be able to resolve them?

  “And poor Dave. Sometimes, he feels he’s working himself to exhaustion for no reason at all. He wonders about the therapists, too. Any time they give more than one possible explanation for why she’s doing it, or more than one strategy for how we can help, he wonders if that means they have no idea at all and they’re only guessing.

  “And here he is, expected to spend more time at the garage than at his own house, so we can pay for it. I keep offering to find a job, but we’d have to put Stevie in daycare then, so anything I made would basically go to that. We’d end up with two exhausted parents and we’d be no further ahead. So he feels stuck. And it’s wearing on him, I can tell.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” Char said. “I’m so sorry. You’re dealing with so much, you and Dave. I’m sure he must be exhausted. And I could see how you’d both be discouraged, when it comes to Morgan
. But don’t lose sight of things where Stevie’s concerned. There is an end game there at least, right? All the speech therapy sessions, all the OT and PT, all the work you’ve both been doing with him? It’s all going to pay off when he trots off to kindergarten with the other five-year-olds in the neighborhood next fall.”

  Sarah let her chin drop to her chest. “I wouldn’t say we’re earning stellar marks on keeping up with all of that these days. I’m running around every afternoon, taking Morgan here for tutoring one day, and then to her private therapist another day, play therapy a third day, and sometimes more. I’ve been getting Stevie to his sessions, but I’m not sitting down with him like I used to, going through all his words, doing all of the exercises they send home with him.

  “I try to do it during the day, when she’s at school, but with all the housework and shopping and everything else, it ends up being an hour here, half an hour there. It’s not enough. And Dave’s at the garage every waking second to pay for both of the kids’ sessions, so he’s not working with Stevie, either. That’s really getting to him, too. He feels he’s ignoring his son for the sake of Morgan. He’s worried that Stevie will end up missing his chance to be at school with his friends because we’re spending all of our energy on his sister.

  “We were going to set aside a few hours every Sunday morning to work with Stevie before church. He gets up hours before we have to leave, and she sleeps in until the last minute, so we thought that would be the perfect window. But we’ve both been so tired that by the end of the week, we don’t have enough energy to walk Stevie through the pronunciation of his own name, let alone all the rest of it. We’ve been sticking him in front of the TV and going back to sleep ourselves.”

  Char squeezed Sarah’s arm. “It’ll get better.”

  Sarah lifted her shoulders. “I wonder. The only good thing I can see right now is that Dave and I are both so exhausted that we don’t have the energy to argue as much. The stress of it all was making us . . . hard on each other. We were bickering all the time. Now we can’t be bothered to bicker. It’s too tiring.” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t sustain it. “That doesn’t mean we’re getting along, though. It only means we’re not talking at all.”