StepMonster...

Her stepdaughters had never cared for her. 

Well that wasn't actually true. To be perfectly fair and accurate, her stepdaughters hated her. 

She had grown to accept it. They were convinced she had been the reason their parent's marriage had crumbled, after all, and so how could they ever soften their stance toward her? It would have been disloyalty to their own mother to do so.

She knew that the marriage had been over long before she ever entered the picture but also felt like most children, even grown ones, tended to idealize their parent's marriages. So of course it wasn't that their parents actively disliked each other and did everything they could to demean and undermine the other, it was because after two years of living in separate rooms and living separate lives their father had fallen for another woman. A woman who had clearly seduced him away. 

And to be fair, she could have been wrong. After all what she knew about her husband's first marriage was what he had told her. Maybe they had been a wonderfully happy couple who would have made it to 70 years of wedded bliss if she hadn't turned up. Maybe he had made up the story of a bad marriage just to justify a drunken mistake on a weekend business trip. Never intending for it to go any further but she was just so beautiful he couldn't help himself? She did like the idea of being irresistible, but had plenty of proof that she was not, so she tended to believe her husband that his marriage was over long before they ever had dinner together. 

Her own children were mostly ambivalent toward her second husband. He wasn't like their father, at all, mostly in that he was still alive, but as her son said to her daughter, "For whatever reason he seems to make Mom happy so I guess we'll deal with it." Not a ringing endorsement but all things considered not bad. 

Their own father had been perfect. Now, to be fair, a large part of that was because he had died when they were 7 and 10 years old in that sweet spot of childhood where parents were still the pinnacle of coolness and wisdom. He had never fallen from that perch. She sometimes envied him. Except for the part that he didn't get to see them grow up to be the incredible adults they had become. But she envied that he remained perfect in their eyes. She had fallen from perfect to horrific and was only just now back to okay really all things considered. 

She understood. Her own father had died when was only two. She had no memories of him that were her own. Just inherited memories from her mother. Who hadn't been married to him long enough for the little interesting things he did to become annoying. And memories from his own mother who was, well, she was his mother. So everything she knew about him was how wonderful he was. The smartest, the most handsome, the best athlete, the most adoring husband and father a girl could have ever asked for. The only negative thing she had ever heard her mother say was that he was a son of a bitch for leaving her to do "all of this" on her own. 

And, again, to be fair, she wasn't supposed to have heard that. Her mother was probably pretty sure she was asleep, and she had only been four so even if she had heard she surely wouldn't remember. But it had been a pretty memorable day. It was the day she had found the most beautiful dress on the floor of her mother's room. Her mother had been sick in bed, which she remembered happened more in those days, so she had taken the dress into her own bedroom to try it on. 

It had two layers to it. The bottom was like glass against her skin. Smooth and cold. She remembered it giving her goosebumps. Over that was another dress made all of lace with what she thought were diamonds woven into the pattern. She had stood looking in the mirror in her room turning this way and that, admiring the way she sparkled. This was the best dress up outfit ever. She never wanted to take it off. 

And so she hadn't.

She wore it while she had a tea party with her dolls. With real lemonade she made all by herself from the bottle of lemon juice and a lot of sugar. And she wore it when she made herself lunch. Peanut butter and grape jelly. Grape jelly is a miracle of science really. It molds itself to the shape of the jelly jar, but then can be spread out flat on the bread, only to fall in jar shaped clumps on your lap while you eat. 

She kept the dress on when she went into the backyard to play. And was still wearing the dress later when she had grabbed some Cheetos from the pantry to snack on while watching TV. She must have fallen asleep on the couch because she didn't remember her mother coming in to the room. She only remembered her yelling. 

She yelled a lot. And there was a part of her that remembered a slap, but that couldn't be right because her mother never hit her. But there was still part of her that remembered a slap. 

That night when she was laying in her mother's bed, supposedly asleep, her mother had been on the phone with her grandmother and she had cried. She had said that she hadn't meant to, that she had sworn she would stop, but it had been their anniversary and it was so hard to face it sober. That's when she said her father was a son of a bitch. And somehow she understood that she was "all of this." From that moment on she tried even harder to be better. To help her mother more. To never be the reason her mother cried on the phone after she thought she was asleep.

Years later when she found out what sober meant it took her awhile to relate that word to her memory of what her mother had said. After all her mother never drank, how could she worry about being sober? It was a few years after that that she realized why her mother never drank anymore. 

But she had been a fatherless child and a husbandless mother. She had also faced it sober due to some strong advice from her own mother. 

Her stepdaughters felt that her father and her husband both dying young was part of why she had seduced their father. Her daddy issues and belief that the world owed her something. She had thought it would be amusing to mention to her husband, who was only ten years older than she, that his daughters had thought she had daddy issues, but knew he wouldn't find it nearly as funny as she did. 

She had thought for awhile that maybe their children at least would be friends. She had had hers young and he had been older when he had his so they were all very close in age. But her own children took exception to having their mother called a "husband stealing whore" and didn't much care for his daughters. And as it's difficult to like someone that doesn't like your child her husband had issue with the outright disdain her children showed to his daughters. They were not one big happy family. 

So she was surprised the day her youngest stepdaughter showed up unannounced at her front door. 

"Oh, Jillian, your father isn't here, he's travelling this week."

"I know. I'm here to talk to you."

And that was how she found out her second husband was having an affair with his first wife. It was not something she had ever suspected and she probably would have never found out since they were quickly remembering why they separated in the first place.

But, to be fair, her stepdaughters hated her.