Non wicked step mom

 

"Oh dear, I wish you hadn't put the iron away hot." 

Those were the only cross or almost cross words my step mom ever spoke to me in five decades. Somehow that woman never looked at the Ugly Step Mother Manual.

She brought my father and me together. Normally brave, he was afraid after five years of separation, I would reject him. She convinced him to try. I didn't reject him and it was the start of a rebuilding.

She had been adopted, but her adoptive father, Jack, shared my July 24th birth date. When I pointed it out Jack, said, "I didn't know you were as old as I am."  

My father was her second husband. They met when she and her first husband, who had a dance studio, performed at the Meadowbrook Golf Club talent show. The dress rehearsal was for children. She wore a hooped skirted, white Civil War dress decorated with violets. She let me borrow it and the entire next day I pretended I lived on a southern plantation.

She had a son and daughter like my father. We weren't "your children and mine children" but "our children."

They had a good marriage, appreciated more because of their unhappy first marriages. Thursday was date night and more than once a bartender or waiter asked if they were married because they seemed so much in love. 

Over the years we developed a friendship as well as a mother-daughter relationship. Thus when my father died, I told her she was still my mom. We continued as two women who loved and respected each other.

She would visit me in Boston and later in Geneva. I was worried to leave her alone in Geneva when I had to work, but despite her not having a word of French, she went out and about. "I made a hairdressing appointment," she told me.

"Where and did he speak English?"

"(name of place) No, but we understood one another."

She was tiny, barely 100 pounds and five feet, but she was mighty. Put a deck of cards in her hand, and she sought blood. After defeating me, she'd feed me things like her Kahlua brownies.

I had asked her to live with me in Switzerland, but she didn't want to leave her home. I understood but realized it would be harder for me to care for her long distance.

Her sinking into dementia was sad. Along with her grandson and caretakers we were able to keep her safe even though we lived thousands of miles apart. Finally we were able to get her into a veterans home. She's served in the Navy in WWII. Her character came through even then when she was named the Valentine's Queen by staff and other residents.

I will always miss her. I try and use her as a role model in many ways.