Nothing is Wasted
My stepdaughter has been following me closely lately. I have taken to calling her my shadow.
She follows me up the stairs and into the laundry room.
“I can help,” she says, taking the laundry pods.
“You just press that button,” I say, pointing to the blinking triangle.
“This one?” she says, pressing the power button and turning the washer off.
“No, the other one,” I say, laughing. I laugh a lot and sometimes she doesn’t think it’s funny. This is one of those times.
She turns the machine back on and presses the right button.
She is ten years old. She has huge doe brown eyes and our biggest fights are about her inability to brush all the hair she has.
I am not her mom, nor do I intend to try to take her mom’s place.
But I do want to teach her how to move through the world as a woman, avoiding the particularly painful mistakes I made. I want to teach her to value herself. I want to teach her to be sweet and tender, loving and gentle, but also not take shit from anyone, and fierce, and above all else, not to base her value off of any man.
“What if you’re so sad that you can’t learn?” she asks me, while she’s underfoot in the kitchen.
It’s 7:15 in the morning. I have been awake since 4:30. My exclusively breastfed baby is 8 months old, and as of late, I cannot seem to get back to sleep after her middle of the night feeding. She wakes around 4 every morning.
“Like, what if you just can’t focus? Can you take a day off?” she wants to know.
“Like a mental health day?” I ask her.
I am moving around the kitchen. In our blended family, there are 7 school age children and I have many waffles and bread becoming toast in the toaster. The children have taken to calling butter “white butter,” as opposed to “peanut butter.”
“White butter for me!” Cade shouts from the living room. Wild Kratts is on the TV. The baby is cooing in her playroom. There is the background hum of Minecraft, somewhere.
“Do you want cereal or toast?” I ask her.
“But what if you can’t learn,” she repeats.
“People have different philosophies on that,” I say. “Some people take mental health days. Other people just push through. It’s hard to know what really constitutes a mental health day,” I say.
I am washing my hands in the sink. Moving dishes to the dishwasher between distributing waffles and toast.
“Did someone say something about that?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “My teacher has just said if I’m sick, how to make up the work.”
“Cinnamon toast?” I ask her.
“Sure,” she says. I put her toast in the toaster.
“I myself haven’t quite figured it out,” I say. “I tend to just push through. But sometimes I just run myself ragged,” I say to her.
“Sometimes I’ve gone to work,” I say, “and it’s been really counterproductive, honestly.”
She sighs. Her toast pops out of the toaster. I spread butter across the bread and open the spice cupboard looking for the cinnamon. I don’t see it.
I find the cinnamon hidden in plain sight on the counter. I shake it onto the bread and hand it to her on a paper plate.
I am 700 days sober. I can’t decide if 700 is a big number, or a little number. But I remember that 7 days seemed impossibly large not that long ago.
I don’t often think about a drink these days. But sometimes I do wish I could disappear, just for a minute. Being fully present is a lot of work.
It’s Halloween night. My stepdaughter is dressed as Bubbles, the blue Powerpuff Girl. I can’t seem to grasp if it’s Powerpuff or PowDerpuff.
“I don’t want to put my hair in pigtails,” she says.
“Then don’t,” I say.
“But my friend wants me to,” she says.
She pauses. “Do you think it’s okay to lie to your friend?” She asks, “What if I say I just forgot?”
“I think I’m supposed to tell you, do whatever you’re comfortable with. But I myself would probably put my hair up just for the pictures,” I say. “I would probably say it really hurts my hair to pull it back like that and I don’t really want to. I just do it for the pictures? But to be honest, if I got pushback, I would probably just go with it.”
Even now, I think, I would just put my hair up. Why not, I would think.
Pick your battles.
On the beach, our five little boys wear puddle jumpers. Cooper is so bold, and so brave. Foolishly brave. He follows Grandpa as far as he can go into the ocean, moving in the wave.
My husband is on the shore holding our other daughter, the baby.
“This is the farthest I’ve been in the ocean,” Mady says.
“Keep going,” my dad says. “It’s okay.”
She gasps when the wave hits.
“I think she’s scared, Grandpa,” I say.
She is on my hip. While she is ten, she is just over sixty pounds, a bit short, about the size of my seven-year-olds.
“Don’t be scared,” my dad says.
“Are you okay,” I say to her.
There is somewhere between trusting your body, knowing when to stop, and pushing through. There is somewhere perfect, where you push just enough.
I am still looking for that spot.
“You only have to do what makes you comfortable,” I say to my stepdaughter.
When I was her age, I walked on the beach in Mexico with my dad. We woke early and we walked around at low tide. One time we saw an octopus. It inked on my dad’s water shoe.
We would purchase breakfast burritos and warm tortillas from a woman named Carmen on the beach. She had the burritos and fresh tortillas.
“Potato, bacon, chorizo,” she would say. The burritos were warm and wrapped
My dad would dive into the waves in the Mexico ocean. The Pacific, which somehow felt so different from the Atlantic.
God I can still smell the tortillas, warm in my hands, in those cellophane bags.
Grandpa leaves to get boogie boards from the house.
“We have to leave soon,” my husband says. I shrug.
“Grandpa does what Grandpa wants,” I say.
Tucker and Mady are elated.
My youngest son Cade has the boogie board on the ground and is laying chest down, on the hard sand, pretending to be surfing.
“Catch two more waves,” we say.
Tucker asks us to take a video to send to his grandma.
Mady catches a wave. The look of delight on her face. Like she couldn’t quite believe it.
Sometimes things take work, and sometimes you just get lucky.
Did you see that? I shout to my husband. He is sitting right next to me, but I’m so excited. I was feeding the baby again, beneath a canopy my husband set up to shield us from the sun. The baby is always hungry.
All around me, there are circumstances outside my control. Trauma is actively occurring.
But that look on her face. The pure joy. Everything we have been through has been to purpose, I think. I have that vulture tattooed on my left shoulder to remind me even when something seems ugly, there is a lesson.
Even when it seems like we’ll never get out of this, there is that: elation on my stepdaughters’ face. Success. To ride a wave without fear. With joy, even.
Nothing is wasted.
I feel like I’m where you are with how incredibly you write. Thank you. I’m a blended family with seven kids. The last two are ours together and they’re almost done with high school. People always stared at us in wonder with how we did it all. Sometimes I look back and wonder the same thing. Lol. But you do what you need to. I loved it all and would go back in a minute. It’s so bittersweet watching the five oldest get married and start families of their own. (8 grandkids so far). I just wanted to let you know to enjoy the chaos of it and don’t sweat the small stuff. Altho it sounds like you’re already doing that.
Congratulations on your recovery time. I’m six and a half yrs in. I was very late to the whole drinking thing but whatever could have possibly gone wrong, did. Thankful to be on the other side of it and all of the pain I was trying to get thru from my abusive ex who wouldn’t leave me alone. Anyways i just wanted to tell you that i really enjoy your writing. Best of luck in all of your adventures!