No More Mr. Mom Part (4)

I wish they were never born.’ And then I felt evil and rotten and was sure I was going to hell. Then I thought, when they come here for the summer, I am going away. I’ll go stay in a hotel down the block so I don’t have to be here. The minute my stepsons walked in the door, my husband would drop our life together.

It resumed when my stepsons left.” One of Sandy’s expectations was that her relationship with her husband would remain important even when her stepsons were around. But because this dad saw his sons so infrequently, when the boys were in town, their entire lives revolved around them. It didn’t help that Sandy and Tim have never gone on a trip together after nine years of marriage, because Tim uses all of his vacation time from work to visit his sons or take time off when they’re in town.

Eventually, Sandy realized she would put herself into a panicked frenzy as the time neared for her stepsons to come for their annual summer visit. When they actually showed up, it was never as bad as she had told herself it would be, and they all had fun together sightseeing or hanging out on the back porch talking. “We’re buddies. Sometimes I’ll take a couple of days off and my stepsons and I will have the whole day together.

I love to go through art museums and I’ll drag them along and they pretend they enjoy it.” The more Sandy started telling herself they were going to have a great time, the easier the summers became. But even now that she’s been in a stepfamily for nearly a decade, she’s aware that it still hurts Tim to know she will never feel about his sons the way he does. Expectations are closely linked to fantasies, and it can be quite painful when you have to accept that some of them won’t come true.

 

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