The Outsider

This is my first marriage (and if all goes according to plan, only.) The husband has been married before. The teenager, as I've mentioned, is my stepson.

It's complicated, living in a blended family. I didn't really understand what I was getting into when I got married. Not that I'd do anything differently. I can't imagine finding a better fit than the two of us have. It's just that sometimes, even now, things happen that knock me off my feet for a little bit.

Recently I cleaned some green marker off a wall. I told the teenager about it a couple of days into Christmas visitation.

Big mistake. I was expecting an, "Oh, cool!" type of reaction (he really is just the nicest kid.) What I got was a funny look, and an, "Oh." Then he walked away.

Later, my husband said to me that he thought the teen was disappointed that I'd cleaned that off. Evidently it had been rather special to our big guy, a memento of times he couldn't remember.

I was feeling badly enough, when my husband said, "To be honest, I was kind of disappointed, too, when you told me you'd cleaned it up."

I about cried. I felt like I'd stepped in and ruined something important to them. There was this special memory for the two of them, and I, the outsider, had come along and stupidly wrecked that.

I knew when I got married that I was marrying into a family. I wasn't starting my own family, I was joining an established unit and I was the one who was going to have to fit in. And I've been very fortunate in that my stepson has bent over backward to welcome me into his family. (Have I mentioned what a great kid he is?) But I really didn't grasp back then just what marrying into an established family meant. I didn't really understand that, even though they're divorced, my husband and his ex are still family to each other and always will be. I didn't understand how often I'd wind up shut out of their family.

It's not the times of crisis that do it, it's the memories. It's all the time that the three of them were together before I came along. My husband and his ex might have been miserable and hating each other at the end, but it wasn't always that way. And sometimes things happen that trigger those happy memories: when she called to tell them their dog had died of old age, when he ran into an old friend he last saw 20 years ago in California, when his mother gave us a bunch of the teenager's old baby pictures that she found in storage.

Or when I clean up the green marker at toddler height in the hallway.