Mourning the Past as a Stepmom

“What color was your hair when you were born?” I asked my husband one Tuesday night as we were watching reruns and scrolling absentmindedly through our phones.

I’m expecting my first baby this fall, and the curiosity of what our tiny newborn will look like was spiking. While my family growing up was very fond of the “put every picture ever taken in a scrapbook” method, my husband was not so lucky. Not having scrapbook access to his family photos, he picked up his phone and began scrolling. He may not have known what his hair looked like as a baby, but luckily he had three babies of his own to add to the evidence.

Looking through the years of Google photos that appeared on his phone, I was reminded, once again, of the full life my husband led before me.

We sat there on the couch, my head on his shoulder as he scrolled quickly through hundreds of photos, looking for newborn hair color. The scrolling slowed as each birth year grew closer: 2016, 2014, and finally 2011. Watching him reverse age, seeing his world, and wondering where I would have been at that point. In 2011, I was working my first job after college, living in a studio apartment, and learning that margaritas, Irish car bombs, and late nights on Broadway did not mix well. Meanwhile, his reasons for being up all night were quite different: finishing college, working two jobs with a newborn and a wife that wasn’t me.

I felt a morbid curiosity creep up with every year that passed on his phone, making me wish he would slow down at 2015, 2013, and every other non-birth year before I came along. Feeling my eyes strain as I was trying to catch a glimpse of the photos he scrolled past, I held back the urge to ask him to give me the phone so I could look at my own pace. Was it strictly curiosity? Or something potentially more self-destructive than that? 

I realized as I saw the faces of the kids I’ve grown to love appear on the phone that it was a mix of a lot of things.

Jealousy: the easiest and most obvious one to pinpoint. That ugly, dangerous, often toxic emotion that we as humans feel from time to time no matter how stable or well adjusted we believe we are. Seeing someone in my husband’s life who used to hold my title of wife. 

Allowing my mind, even for a split second, to play tricks and wonder what life was like back then for him, for the kids. How they felt when their parents were still together. Wondering if there was a part of them, even knowing the love they feel for me and their stepdad, that wished their parents had worked it out. That they wouldn’t have to have two homes, two Christmases, two sets of rules, one wardrobe split between two houses. 

Snapping myself back to reality and seeing the man I married in front of me, I don’t allow myself to sit in this place for more than what feels like a millisecond. I know there is no need for jealousy. There is not a place for it here in our relationship, in our home, but it will always be lurking. Sometimes it will be distant — the farthest thing from our lives — and other less confident times, it will find its way closer and closer until it knocks on our door asking to be let in. I am my husband’s second wife. The person I love most in the world, at one point loved someone else, had a full life with that person, and took pictures that once filled his phone.

Curiosity: Looking past the people standing in the photos to the walls behind them. What kind of house did they live in? What were winters really like in Minnesota? What was my husband’s day-to-day like back then? What was he like when he used to work as a chef? Thinking about how he gets after a long day of work now and wondering if it was similar back then. What was he like at 24 vs 34? Seeing familiar shirts that are still in our closet and shirts he clearly gave away over the years. What made him want to keep that shirt all this time but get rid of the other one?

Informational: when did the allergies for the kids start? Asking my husband if he thinks our son will have them too. Did they come from his side of the family or hers? How did they do with potty training? How long before they walked?

But the emotion that I sat with the longest was sadness: a type of mourning that at first I just lumped together with jealousy. I then realized that sadness felt more like grief. A sadness from seeing the 4 people I love the most in the world live so many years of their lives without me. Feeling a longing, a heartache; like I missed them before I even knew they existed. 

Looking at photos of them laughing, wondering if it was a similar laugh to the one I know. Seeing pictures of the oldest holding the youngest with such tenderness and wondering when things switched for them and when they started fighting more. My brain reeled, wanting to ask these questions because I wanted to know everything about the people I love, but also feeling sad that I have to at all. Wishing these photos were memories instead of information that had to be told to me years later.

“So, light brown mostly.”

I’d forgotten the original intent of scrolling down this long, complex lane of memories. Mostly light brown hair is what the kids had when they were born.

As my husband downloaded a handful of baby photos to show the kids, he had no idea of the circus of thoughts going through my head. He simply went to the photos saved on his phone, selected the ones he wanted to send, and sent them to our family group chat.

The group chat with him, me, and our kids. The kids whose laughs I could recognize in a crowded room, the oldest, whose personality is forming, inching closer and closer to those teenage years and becoming her own person more and more every day. The middle one whose laugh will instantly make you smile and whose eyes often drift off deep in thought, making you wonder where his mind wandered to now. The youngest, who is wild and loud and almost as tall as his older brother, who tries to keep up and tackle his dad but cries big, childlike tears and still wants to be held when things don’t go his way.

Our family. The family that we have now. Not the one he had ten years ago in a home I don’t recognize, with clothes that no longer hang in his closet. The home we bought last year and fixed up together. The one with the chipped doors that we keep telling ourselves we're going to repaint, the back porch where we sit and drink coffee while we can look over our tiny vegetable garden and watch the dogs dig things up that they shouldn’t in the backyard. 

Part of me will always mourn the past that I never had with them. Part of me will always succumb even if only for a millisecond to one or more of those less than desirable emotions. But I won’t sit there long. After the millisecond passes, I’ll be sure to open my eyes to what I have today, pull out my phone hopefully just in time to take a picture of our oldest holding her newborn brother with his mostly light brown hair.