Can't buy Love

Now that our lives had normalized we really tried to be a united family, the four of us. What we never really looked at was how a child really handles adjusting to a life that they had no say in putting together.

Children cannot pick their parents, step parents, siblings or have much say in where they will spend their weekends or anything for that matter. Life is simply thrown at them, and they have to deal with it, like it or not.they have to just go along with everything.that is until they get older. That is the time when a parent should start to pay close attention to what is and isn't being said. I think we have generations now of really messed up adults that haven't ever recovered from the effects of coming from a divorced family.

No matter how sensitive we were to Bob's daughter and her feelings it seemed he just couldn't do it right. Could not seem to make her happy.
Sometimes we wondered, perhaps we should have moved further away like we had originally planned on doing. We stayed close to Beverly Hills to make sure his daughter did not feel left out but that certainly wasn't the answer. Malibu may as well have been the end of the earth. As far as the life styles went. weekends at our house was almost like putting a mirror up to her and making her face it head on. She had two sets of parents whether she liked it or not.

What she wanted more than anything was to have her parents together again, not to be from a divorced family. I think many children feel that way. She never really forgave her dad for the divorce and simply refused to believe that perhaps maybe both her dad and her mom wanted the divorce. I think it was inconceivable to her that maybe her Mom didn't want to be married to him any longer either. They were young and he was in the middle of his newly diagnosed alcoholism and the death of his Mom. It was so apparent in her every unspoken word that she was not happy. At that time she was the only one of her friends to come from a divorced family.

The resentment or maybe disappointment was just too real to ignore. She probably wished in her subconscious that her step dad was her real dad. That way she would only have one Dad and not two.

It really broke her father's heart. He didn't know how to make his little girl happy. But she wasn't really a little girl any longer. She knew how it affected him, at least I think she did, but even she couldn't help how she felt. She just didn't want to pack her bags every weekend and come to see Daddy and the other family. It's a common problem.

As a step parent I felt that there was really very little I could do to help the two of them get along except to try and be a friend to both of them. I tried my best to make excuses to Bob as to why it was OK for his daughter to not spend every weekend with us. I listened to her when she tried to explain why she couldn't come over. I defended her position every chance I got. There was a very fine line between interfering and upsetting either of them. I was very aware of how sensitive he was of her not coming over as often as he wanted her to.

Being the kind of step parent like I was, I felt more like a spectator in their relationship and more like a friend. trying to stay neutral. I enjoyed shopping with her, baking cookies going to movies, etc. When it came to other things that parents and teens have to go through, I just didn't have to. I never could have or tried to be another Mother to her. We didn't discuss the important decisions much. We didn't fight all those years and only in her later years after college did we actually ever have any words spoken in anger. Looking back our relationship was rather shallow for all the years we were in each other's lives. I was an outsider, the woman she called when she needed permission to charge something on her Dad's credit card. Of course the answer was always yes. No wonder why I thought she loved me. She just loved the fact that I never said no.

We just learned not rock the boat and hoped she would spend more time with us. Much like the philosophy that the more you protest with a child the more they want to do what it is that they are not supposed to do. We thought it was a phase she would grow out of. The moody teen age years. She never grew out of it and the distance just kept growing larger and larger. It was the beginning of the end of his dream of gaining her unconditional love again.

There were years that went by when she didn't spend any of the Holidays with her dad or her grandfather. We didn't want to "Put Pressure" on her, as her dad would say. So we didn't. Our family rarely saw her even on Father's Day. She spent it with her Step Dad. He didn't want to upset anyone. We were basically given the one week Summer Vacation and the One week Winter Break. There were a total of seven of us in the family. So that meant we got together for most of the birthdays. The Obligatory birthday dinners. In the end even that would be put on hold when she grew up and went to college. Bob's dreams of a close knit family of four was more than over. It was too painful for him. He carried on with us. We were the "Three Musketeers".
We did everything together.

We just stopped discussing the fact that our feelings were really hurt. Unless Bob was willing to discuss the situation with her Mom things would never change. He would not do it. His motto of "Don't rock the boat" was alive and well in his approach. He simply let his daughter do what she wanted, this way he wouldn't loose her love he thought. What he didn't know is that every time he gave in and didn't fight to have her with him, he lost her a little more at a time.

She was now referring to her step-father as her Dad. Those words cut like a knife straight to his heart. I couldn't help that pain go away. I watched it fester inside of him for years. Little by little his feeling would surface and the bickering would start between them. In the end even our once happy family vacations turned into a nightmare for us all.
We continued to go on our annual ski trip. It used to be something that we used to look forward to so much. Of course the anticipation was great, He would proceed to buy all of us new ski outfits, trying to make her love him.she always got a head to toe new outfit, actually Bob would buy us all whatever we wanted. Then he would get upset with her if she was quiet and moody. It didn't occur to him that he was doing the same exact thing to her. Being moody. Bob had a way of making a person feel uncomfortable with just a look or the tone of his voice. Matt seemed to be the only one oblivious to his Dad's mood swings.

The first thing Bob would do when he was upset was to throw in our faces how much he spent on us. It wasn't pleasant. Looking back on those years I now realize that what was really going on was Bob wanting to relieve his anxiety with something to take the edge off his feelings. We spent years battling the "Dry Drunk" syndrome and didn't even realize it. During those years it was later pointed out to me by our Son that I was so "Wishy Washy" as he called it. I was so terrified of setting him off I was the consummate Yes wife. Yes to this, yes to that. Whatever he wanted I did, whatever he said I agreed with. It was like I had no real opinion. If I did I simply buried it. Remember "DON'T ROCK THE BOAT". Bob's sobriety was the most important thing in the world to me. I picked my battles and the battle of His daughter wasn't one I could win. I could only try to make it better for the two of them.

We would go out to dinner and they would get in arguments about silly things. Like hypothetical examples of what would happen if she dated someone not of her race.
Or the time they had a fight about some plastic surgery he mom had gotten that I guess she never knew about, but he paid for it while they were married. Unpleasantness was the norm. She didn't like the way he ate or dressed, he didn't like the way she sulked and ignored him. He simply didn't like the fact that she didn't like him for who he was. He made it worse trying to make things better.

One year he brought her boyfriend along with us hoping that maybe they would connect again. All her friends liked him. He was really cool. She never got it. Blame it on Teen-age angst, hormones I really don't know what it was. Finally, she just stopped coming on our family vacations.

Now the bad times really reared their ugly little heads. It wasn't better without her it was more obvious that he had lost the love of his beloved daughter somewhere along the line and he couldn't regain the once great love she had for him.

Who knows how a child goes from loving a parent to being repulsed by that same parent.It happens all the time, he was experiencing what a lot of parents go through with their kids. So what if She criticized everything he did, said or wore. I felt sorry for him and for her. I'm not sure if She ever saw how handsome, funny and cool he was. She wanted him to be just like all the dad's the other Beverly Hills kids had. She even wrote about those feelings in an essay to get into college. They were just like Oil and Water. It would never change.