Sugar skulls
My girlfriend’s daughter and I were friends back before her mom was my girlfriend. We were friends when an accurate description of her would have been “my coworker’s daughter.” We used to have rubber-band fights in the office, my coworker’s daughter and I. We would do art projects. She helped me fill in my life calendar.
Then suddenly my coworker became my girlfriend and my coworker’s daughter became my girlfriend’s daughter and we are no longer cool.
She’s an only child, the child formerly referred to as my coworker’s daughter. She has a good dad with whom she spends half of every week. She and her mother are very close. I am a complication.
We’ve tried to blend—hasn’t gone amazing. First I came over to paint sugar skulls for Dia de los Muertos. Everyone—aunties, cousins, girlfriend, girlfriend’s daughter, me—painting sugar skulls. The paint on my sugar skull was expressionistic. I didn’t know where I was going having zero paint-a-sugar-skull priors. I had bottle caps for eyes. There was a paper plate hat. When all the sugar skulls were finished, my girlfriend’s daughter was asked what she thought of mine. You don’t know hope’s opposite until a black-eyed eleven year old tells your future familia she wants to destroy your art.
Not long later there was a miniature golf thing. Just my girlfriend’s daughter, my girlfriend, and I. My girlfriend’s daughter appointed herself scorekeeper. Math got a little illogical but that was OK. I didn’t need to win at golf. My game within the game was to goof around with my girlfriend’s daughter, i.e. the scorekeeper, the way we used to in the office with the rubber-bands. But nope. Didn’t workout. She got annoyed. Angry. Opted out of the game. Stopped putting. Stopped keeping score. That was quite the car ride home. For the three of us in different ways.
There were a few more incidents like that, but incidents have since given way to moments. Terrible incidents to terrible moments was enough progress for us to move in, my girlfriend and I. Meaning I live with my girlfriend’s daughter half the time, when she is not at her dad’s.
We are not on speaking terms, my girlfriend’s daughter and I, because we do not interact. When she has to pass me in the house it is a silent zoom-by. And that is OK. That is how she feels.
Her home pulled apart one day when she was small. One day it was her, her mom, and her dad in a comfortable house. The next day it was her and her mom in a strange, small apartment. When she finally saw her dad again, there was another woman with him, and she had to call that woman “bonus mom.” Enter eight years of back and forth—house to apartment. Mom to dad-and-bonus-mom. Repeat.
Her mom, now my girlfriend, always put her first. Never judged her, never brought men around, traveled with her, cooked for her. Mom was where she was safe to be herself, to relax, to not have to live up to anything.
Then I happened.
If I was her and I happened, I would be just as angry.
I was mad a lot at her age. I got yanked around a lot and thrown into foreign environments against my will. I didn’t want to be in those environments. I just wanted to be plugged back in to the power-grid so to speak and I couldn’t find an outlet that fit and I was mad that I had to build my own adapters.
It is very much OK to be mad. Mad is just protection and it is very much OK to protect yourself. Just like it is OK to sleep on the couch half the week and birdbath in the downstairs bathroom before work because a mother and daughter still need to be close. Change can take a while. I mean look at me. I never catastrophize ever.
I admire your quiet, compassionate birdbath in the downstairs bathroom.