Of all the roles I have had to inhabit in my lifetime, the most elusive, disturbing and surprising has undoubtedly been that of stepmother. As we publish some of your still-so-authentic parenting stories this week, I would be remiss to leave that side of the parenting world behind. Although it is less in the foreground, it is held by so many women and men who, still here, often do what is called “their possible”, somewhere on the backstage of the famous ” co-parenting”, whether it is accomplished, chaotic or, worse, non-existent.
If I am able to count many stories of “wicked stepmothers or stepfathers” almost stuck to the myth taken up by all these children’s stories, I also have in my memory hundreds of stories of children who live in the heart of an adult who, without being their parent, invests it in a way that comes close to it. “A way that comes close” is perhaps the phrase to remember, which I myself learned sometimes the hard way, during the last fifteen years spent weaving, escaping and timidly recreating creepers. between my heart and that of three beings who have taught me so much about myself.
If my own children revealed to me the mother that I was, the shadows which flowed in my back since childhood and even that of my parents, I remained in a relatively well-known story. My relationship with my stepchildren revealed to me aspects of myself that I was totally unaware of, an otherness in myself that I had tended to project onto others as we often do with children. aspects that we fail to recognize in ourselves, the beautiful as well as the ugly.
The relative impotence, which we must immediately accept when we play a supporting role in a story that began many years before our arrival, has not always brought out the most beautiful aspects of me. It took me time to grasp the exact posture to adopt when it comes to not trying too hard to “fill the voids” that appear to us, while offering an outstretched hand, an ear, words to create meaning, help with homework, liftsguards, plans B, C or D, without expecting too much in return.
I learned from them that it was sometimes not enough to love, that there were limits, rhythms to be honored when one settles into the lives of children who did not ask for anything and who may have nothing to do with our romance, our desire to add brothers, sisters, dogs, cats, to make house around what, in them, perhaps remains as a makeshift shelter on the ruins of a former life which remains the most beautiful in their memory.
The story in which we “disembark” is theirs, not ours, at least until they decide to give us a role in it. The childhood clinic and my life as a mother-in-law taught me how much the child places the characters in his second or third house, according to what he is able to take as a risk, without threatening those who play the roles principals, without there being “added pain”, guilt for betraying, fear of additional losses to come.
But more than anything, I learned that a child is not a territory in which we plant a flag, some footprint that should reassure us that we will be deploying much more than a makeshift camp here, but a house, a village, an accordion family that shrinks and grows according to the weeks, the breaths, the music that suits us.
From “blended family”, I have seen many second-wave couples agree to move on to “repaired family”, then to “something else that is not really called family”.
The child-territory is possibly the child who has touched me the most, both in my clinic and in my personal life. There are many ways to colonize a child. Modern ways are more subtle, sometimes involving the diversion of a discourse on model parenthood, to the detriment of one thing, perhaps the only thing that should be preserved as much as possible: the psychic sovereignty of the child. It is the most difficult to identify, to hear, sometimes under the symptoms, in a foreign language that we must take the time to decipher, beyond our own narcissistic needs for confirmation, our feelings of injustice or of our weariness.
My great luck, both with my stepchildren and with my clinic, is the passage of time, the time that keeps me alive and therefore constantly learning about life.
Young adults whom I had received when they were children, children-territories caught up in never-ending conflicts, sometimes come back to consult me to tell now, in the light of their rediscovered words, what was really going on. in them as adults disputed their inner world.
Young adults also sometimes come back to live for a while at home, leading me to believe that there are lives after lives, links that survive time, almost death, rebirths offered by awareness and evolution. .
My optimism in the face of possible psychological transformations in humans comes in large part from what my life as a mother-in-law has taught me, because, of all the roles I have played, I think this is the one that transformed me the most as a person, leading me to inhabit only my rightful place, neither more nor less, to sometimes give up my good intentions which, in fact, also hid my own desires, which could not be at all meet the needs of the child in question.
I would have liked to have understood everything from the first day, when, then aged 28, I met a little blonde of four years old, a little kitty of three years old and a big boy of seven years old. But they are the ones who taught me everything, over the course of my mistakes, my failures and my recoveries, at the end of my heart which sometimes broke, without them really knowing it, because I was behind the scenes of their own stage, on which enough things were happening.
Children are not territories, they are the ones who plant their flag in our hearts, and this revelation continues to leave its lessons in me, after fifteen years.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.