It seems maybe frivolous, the ex-stepmother.  There's not much more anonymous, not much more throw-away than that phrase: ex-stepmother. Am I hyphenating it right?  I have no idea, but I feel it wants to be one word.  It should be.  Compact, quick, temporary.

I was ambivalent about her for a very long time.  She emailed me at one point, I ranted angrily about it here but the archives don't go back that far.  I never replied.  My silence said more than any group of words could.  She wanted to maintain contact, and I didn't see any need to.  But my brother, he was raised by women.  That's a very simple way to say a very complex thing, but my brother has always favored mothers.  He lived with my father and the ex for years after he got out of the Marines, so his relationship with her is very different than mine.  They had time to develop an actual relationship, where all I had time to do was get to know her a bit, then I'd head back home.  But my brother was there full time for years, and his kids were raised in her line of sight.

So they stayed in touch.  It's a point of contention for me, but not my business, so I stay out of it.  I don't like it, but I don't need to, except...well, we're family.  And the math changes with family.  Plus, my father and my brother don't talk.  My brother has big issues with my father's politics, huge problems with the way he hates things.  I always felt that there was more than that, though, and that my brother holds onto a contempt for my father stemming from the divorce from my mom oh so many eons ago.  He is his mother's son, they've always been very close.  Now he doesn't talk to my father all that much, but still maintains a relationship with a woman who helped destroy what was left of my father's good will.

See, my father is a pretty bitter guy these days.  I'd say if the last divorce did anything, it accelerated some changes that were intended for his later years.  It left him with a bitter taste for anything left of center, politically and socially (the ex was pretty left-of-center, a total tree hugging pseudo-pagan with a lot of interest in wicca).  It left him very burned about the nature of love; he refuses to have anything to do with it anymore.  Despite the fact that he has had a wonderful girlfriend for, like, years now, he refuses to take it seriously.  And who can blame him?  The previous two loves of his life cheated on him and left him.

In the same way that my brother favors female influences, I favor my father.  I am definitely my father's son.  Lately, though, it's hard to see the man through the hate he has.  I miss what he used to be; now there is worry and hate where there used to be concern and love.  And I know that it wasn't caused by the ex, entirely.  It never is, and something as complex as a person cannot be simply explained by something so chaotic and multi-dimensional as a failed relationship.  Nor can the relationship be divided equally between him and her, right and wrong, good and bad. 

But I know who I'm related to.  I know who I owe my very life to, and it's not this woman, so fuck her.  It was easy, really, for me to not reply to her, for me to not think about it.  She didn't even occur to me, other than as a factor in my father's new outlook on life.

Stumbling blindly into her, then, was eye opening into my real feelings on the matter.  I immediately sought all the information I could on her.  I felt that urge rising, to find the ex-prison-guard sadist she married (only six years my senior), find him in the crosshairs at 200 yards, engage his head in a cloud of pink mist.  Alarm bells at that...I never feel like that.  Never.

Scary how quickly I took on my father's misplaced anger; he never expressed hatred toward her or him that I heard, he laughs at her now.  So I feel it for him.  And that rant I wrote here years ago, about never forgiving her, about wanting to beat the shit out of the guy she'd fucked my father over for....

Misplaced.

I spent hours tracking her and him.  He's big into porn, especially porn of tiny, skinny women.  He's an ex prison guard with a hate site written up about him.  He posts to usenet a lot.  He's big into fantasy football and video games. He's a goth(!!).  He's a sadist, like, for real.  He's also in charge of a housing unit for troubled youth in northern California (because where else does a bitter prison guard sadist end up).  They have a family website, she has a Yahoo blog.  It's all very revealing, over time, and you see things you maybe don't want to see about someone who used to be your stepmother, some kinks and behavioral characteristics that make you wonder where all the feminist tirades came from.  She starts looking not just human, but flawed in some very deep ways.

But somewhere in all of that noise and hatred and seriously amped-up anger, I started thinking: why am I wasting my time hating this woman?  She hurt my father, but he's an adult.  He has to deal with that, I can't deal with it for him.  And he and I have talked about it in depth, in detail, in very personal detail, and maybe that's what caused my attachment to the problem.  But it's not my problem to solve.  I can support my father, and I can talk to him about why the anger, where it comes from, but I can't make it go away.

So, what then?  Am I angry at her for abandoning me?  The woman never meant much to me.  Her daughters were cool and all, and I liked her take on certain things.  She and I got into numerous very angry shouting matches when I lived with her and my father, and years later when we visited I apologized for my chaotic jerk-ass younger self, and she was receptive.  We patched up what we needed to.

So, am I angry at my brother for not having to good taste to, ya know, side with blood?  What good does that do?  I don't know what his motives are, but it's not my life.  He has issues that extend far beyond her, and she's just an outlet for some of those emotions that he is probably both very aware of and comfortable with.  I can't make him like our dad. I can talk to him about it, and I can provide insight when asked, but I can't guess at what his reasoning is, and I don't need to.

So, why all the hate on my end for some woman who should now have zero impact on me?  I know my family is susceptible to hate the same way some families are susceptible to cancer.  We wallow in it, we live and breathe it.  Plus I'm a big fan of anger, sometimes it is a required thing.  Anger is what gets me off the couch and in the streets when, say, the presidency is stolen.

But I can't hate this woman, this stranger.  I don't have to like her.  I don't have to think about her at all, other than in passing when my brother and I talk, and even then I can be sort of ambivalent.  Just, you know, not consumed.

It's just not worth it, and in the end it may lead to me better understanding my own nature versus my influences.  Hate is a harsh filter, tends to block out all else.  It would be nice to tone that down, to stop assuming that I need to explode for the sake of my emotions.

So, that's what I spent my Sunday working on.  Abandonment issues, my father, my role as a son, my brother, and the bitch what fucked it all up.  In the end, I think we'll all be OK if we can all just talk about it.