Step kids

My husband will be home late tonight because he's picking his children up for the weekend. Oh joy. I get to take care of other people's kids all weekend while missing my own, all the while getting no appreciation or recognition for my efforts. I resent them. I resent their happy, carefree lives; their innocence, their baby brother who was born just 1 week after my baby died. I resent having their living, breathing selves in my home and having to listen to their gaiety and laughter. I am jealous that my husband has living children and I do not. I worry that his living children make him 'forget' Kara or miss her less. I know it is not true, because I told him I think about it and he reassures me that nothing could ever make him forget her, or take the pain away from his heart. He assured me that he still cries at least once a day (and it oddly reassured me) and that his living children could never soften the grief and love he feels for Kara. Yet I still resent them for their lives and their meaning to my DH. I want to give him more children. I want to have OUR children, not someone else's. I've taken care of his children (with his ex-wife) for over 10 years now - I'm tired of faking it. I'm tired of feeling left out of this family. I feel no connection to them after 10 years (thanks to their b*tch mother.) Don't get me wrong - they're great kids. Polite, sweet and good-natured. But they're not mine. God help me, I can't get past it. At the end of the day, I'm just 'B'. Unappreciated, unconnected genetically.

I want my own children to need me, to want their mother. I want my own children to make my husband's eyes glitter with happiness and laughter. I want my own children to celebrate the holidays with and to bring to family functions. I want to kiss my own children goodnight and to give them warm hugs and soft lullabyes. I want to raise my own children - teach them right from wrong, help them to grow into the best people they can be. Infertility and grief are strange bedfellows - they feed off of one another and keep my heart aching over one or the other. My infetility and my grief also combine to make me resentful of my stepchildren. I should be grown-up enough to overcome this, but I'm not. The sad reality is that I am a bitter, grieving mother forced to care for her perfectly healthy stepchildren, while her baby is dead.

I can't even say that I'll try to do better. I can't. It's simply not in me after 10 years of trying. I'd rather go shopping while they're here than take them bowling with DH. I'd rather go to the gym and let them make themselves cereal than stay home and make pancakes or a family-Sunday-breakfast. We are not a family and I can't pretend that we are. I am their maid, their cook, their laundress...that is all. I feel like it would have been different, had Kara lived. We would have been a family, finally connected by blood. Maybe it will be different if we have a rainbow baby. I hope that a real, live baby will soften the boundaries between us and make us a real family someday. I believe that is what it would take to change what is.




I miss my girl. I miss her every minute of every day.