I was ready for a reckoning 😡

I turn 50 later this year, and for nearly half that time, I have been telling people that I could not stand my stepfather.

As a high-schooler, this was because he was really strict and thoroughly self-righteous. Of course, I was also a teenager, so I can’t be trusted to be entirely objective when it comes to evaluating parental judgment I disagreed with.

For much of the past 25 years, however, my anger stemmed from the events that led my mom to divorce him. I was specifically furious that he was either unable or unwilling to be accountable for what he’d done let alone apologize for the pain he’d caused.

It was the biggest grudge of my life. In fact, it was a grudge so big that I didn’t really think of it as a grudge. It was more like a defining fact of who I was, and I spent years imagining a variety of ways I might act on this anger that I harbored toward the man. I never did, though, in large part because of how that may have affected my lovely and loving mom.

She died in March 2019 at her home in Santa Cruz County four years after being diagnosed with cancer. I was with her at the end along with my brother and sister, which is what she had wanted.

In the weeks that followed, I got my first hint of how this loss would change not so much how I felt about my stepfather, but how I would deal with those feelings.

I’ll explain that in the main body of today’s newsletter, before giving you a choose-your-own-adventure style poll to determine what I write about next. First I want to share a funny story I received from a reader:

If you’ve got an grudge you’re willing to share, please do and I’ll keep it as anonymous as you’d like. You can email me at [email protected] or you can click the button below and share directly in the comments.

Ready for a reckoning

In the days leading up to my mom’s memorial in April 2019, I found myself imagining what I would do if my stepfather showed up.

There wasn’t any reason for me to think that he would.

He had been divorced from my mom for 15 years at that point, and it had been nine, maybe even 10 years since she had spoken to him.

She did not inform him when she was diagnosed with cancer in September 2015. I had not spoken to him since 2005 and neither my brother nor my sister remained in touch with him. As far as I knew, he was entirely unaware of the four years of treatment and multiple surgeries my mom had gone through.

I knew he lived in Sonoma, Calif., though, and that’s because I occasionally visited his LinkedIn profile and (more tellingly) Googled him to see where he was living. I knew that following the divorce, he’d gone from San Francisco to Spokane before coming back to California.

Still, showing up at her memorial seemed like the kind of thing he would do, injecting himself into an emotionally fraught situation. I decided that if he came, I was going to ask him to leave.

I went so far as visualizing the scene:

Me, standing at the front of the non-denominational Unitarian church on Freedom Boulevard, looking out on the people who’d loved my mother and then seeing his short and bristly black hair, his stoic expression and the broad shouldered, navy blue suit.

Upon registering his presence, I’d stop stop speaking, my face showing a combination of confusion and indignance.

“What are you doing here?” I’d ask.

No, no, no. That’s too reactive.

Rewind the fantasy.

Restart:

I would stop speaking into the microphone and let the emotion drain from my face. I’d then deliberately walk from the front of the church down the aisle stopping at the row where he was sitting. Then, I’d look directly at him and state in a flat, neutral tone, “You’re not welcome here. You need to leave.”

I would not move until he got up and walked out.

This was the latest iteration of what I now understand to be a series revenge fantasies. To refer to them as day dreams seems too benign, but that’s exactly what they were. Little fantasies I’d periodically indulge in.

I’d conjure up some sort of present-day confrontation or I would revisit a previous interaction between us, time traveling so I could imagine an alternate ending.

Usually, there was some sort of audience.

Occasionally, I’d picture the confrontation becoming physical.

In every instance, I would stand up to him in a way I never had before. Not when I was a teenager in the years following his marriage to my mom. Not later on, when I was in the back half of my 20s, and their marriage collapsed under the weight of my stepfather’s professional collapse and my mom’s conclusion that he’d been unfaithful.

While I wouldn’t go so far as saying I was obsessed with my stepfather, my anger toward him was something that stayed smoldering in my psyche. This remained true even after my mom had moved on from him, something that had not been easy and often left her feeling lonely.

A few years after their divorce had been finalized, she told me about the little saying she’d come up with for those moments when she found herself thinking about him.

“Why don’t you just go smoke?” she’d say.

This was a reference to the habit he’d developed that last year of their marriage. He hadn’t asked her about it, nor offered an explanation. He just started smoking cigarettes downstairs at night in the kitchen while he talked on the phone, the door propped open to vent the fumes.

My mom said this had gone on for four or five days when he finally asked, “You’re not worried about me smoking a few cigarettes, are you?”

She told him if he was going to smoke, he needed to do it in the garage.

So in the years after the divorce, when she found him visiting her thoughts in those years after their marriage ended, she’d kick him out of her mind by telling him to go smoke.

Eventually, the thoughts became less intrusive, and in the last few years of her life, I remember her specifically telling me, “I really don’t think about him that much any more.”

That was not the case for me. While the end of their marriage didn’t have all that much of an impact on my day-to-day life, it still made me mad. The fact that I was thinking about him in the days leading up to my mom’s memorial shows how he continued to hang over my understanding of not just my family, but myself.

Mom’s memorial

There was a bowl filled with sea glass sitting on a table just inside the entrance to the non-denominational Unitarian church where we held my mom’s memorial.

It was my sister’s idea. My mom had lived about half a mile from the beach, and she walked down just about every day. She’d invariably take off her shoes once she reached the sand, walking down to where the water lapped onto the shore, scanning the breakwater for shells.

“My tinies,” she called them.

The front pockets of her pants would be wet at the seams when she returned from the shells she’d slid inside.

I’ve got an example on the wall in front of my desk, a small 5-by-3 frame with seven shells and one silver dollar, none of them larger than a pinky nail.

She really loved sea glass, though. The edges rounded and the surface scuffed and cloudy. My sister, Robin, wrote a note encouraging people to reach into the bowl, touch the glass, even keep a piece or two if they wanted.

We also had copies of a story that I'd written for my radio station's Web site as well as a column my wife had written for The Seattle Times. I looked over as the ceremony was about to begin and saw my brother, Casey, sitting in a chair, elbows on his knees and looking at the floor while his wife sat opposite of him, holding his face one of her palms cupping each cheek, their foreheads touching. It was so tender.

There was no religious component to the service. When I asked, my mom had been very clear she did not want her body celebrated or even present at any memorial we held. She’d been cremated, her ashes spread at sea.

So we just talked. I started, taking the microphone and welcoming these people who’d come to remember my mom and the love they had for her.

Six of my father’s siblings had driven up from Southern California along with a solid two dozen of my cousins from that side of the family. There was Sharon and Mike, who’d driven down from Oregon, and my mom’s brother, her aunt and uncle who’d come over from San Francisco. There were her cousins, Cathy and Terry, and her incredibly sweet friend Carol, who’d been such a good companion there in Santa Cruz.

The Santa Barbara crew was there, too. Friends from college, who’d known my mom back when she’d first met my father. Jann, her freshman roommate, and Peter. Her dear friend Blair. Ray. Big Hal. Steve. The Reverend Shmitty.

“Our people,” my mom would have said. She loved fiercely and without reservation and she was well loved in return.

The memorial lasted for an hour. There was more laughter than tears. We had trays of food from my mom’s favorite bakery and afterward we cleaned up the church, piling the chairs into stacks of five as we’d been instructed and sweeping the floor.

It wasn’t until I unlocked my rental car and sat down behind the wheel that I though about who hadn’t been there: my stepfather.

I felt a small tinge of anger but a stronger tug of disappointment. At first, I chalked this up to my desire for a confrontation. I was feeling let down because I hadn’t gotten a chance to be all big and tough by showing him who was boss.

But there was something else there, too. I was hurt that my mom had died and he hadn’t noticed. Did we really mean that little to him?

I recognize that it isn’t even remotely fair for a number of reasons, the first one being we had not informed him. Second, each of us — in our own way — had made it clear we no longer wanted to be in contact with him. Finally, there was the fact that I’d been planning to kick his ass out if he showed up and here I was feeling snubbed because we hadn’t heard from him?

But looking back, the reason it bothered me was because I assumed that he followed us as ardently as I followed him, and that was clearly not the case.

My mom had passed away after a long battle with cancer. I had written about this and discussed it in a fairly public fashion, and it never hit his radar. While it wasn’t at all reasonable for me to be mad at him about this I can’t deny that it hurt.

He’d been the epicenter for two of the biggest seismic events in my life. Someone who’d shaken absolutely everything up first when he married my mom and then let when she felt compelled to divorce him. The aftershocks lasted years.

The year after he’d moved out, he sent me a letter, inviting me to visit him for Christmas. He asked me to respond by email, confirming a date. I sent him a letter saying there would need to be an honest conversation about what had happened before I traveled to visit him. I never heard back from him.

I last saw him in May 2005 at my brother’s college graduation. He walked up to me and — without asking — spread his arms in expectation of a hug. I’d obliged as I always had, not wanting to cause a scene. Afterward, I spent years resenting not just that I complied, but he’d put me in a position where I felt compelled to do so.

I’d held onto that anger for 14 years, and now my mom was gone, and for the first time in my life, I was able to think what I wanted from my stepfather without considering the effect it would have on her.

I thought I knew exactly why I was so angry at my stepfather, and I’d already spent years imagining what I wanted to do about it.

Turns out I had a lot to learn about both ends of that equation.

If you liked this piece, I’d be very grateful if you shared it with someone you think it might resonate with.

Do you remember the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books where you had a hand in the plot by picking what the protagonist would do next?

Well, this is kind of like that, only instead of decisions on what I will do, you get to voice your opinion on where this story should go next.