The forgotten cost of divorce – losing the stepchildren you love
THE year before last, on the eve of my 44th birthday, I was sitting in the garden of my new flat with a glass of wine. It was three months after my marriage had broken up, but it wasn’t the lack of a husband that made me burst into tears. It was realising that this would be the first birthday in 17 years I wouldn’t be getting a card from my stepdaughter.
Leila* was Jim’s eldest daughter and when his first marriage ended, she chose to stay with him. She was eight when I met her — beautiful, with huge eyes, bobbed hair and the glare of an assassin when she wasn’t happy. And, at first, she wasn’t. Like many children of divorce, she wanted her daddy to herself.
She would stomp along between me and her dad to keep us apart. It was natural, and I tried to see things from her perspective.
Things changed a few months in when Jim had a last-minute work call and had to miss Leila’s school concert. She was in tears, and I said ‘I’ll come’.
After a few years, she and Jim moved in with me and my son Tom, who, at seven, was three years younger than Leila. They quickly established a sibling relationship filled with arguments, laughter, control and sticking together against us adults.
I tried to be fair to Leila — and her two sisters, who’d stay at weekends — and not favour Tom. But in times of trouble, the girls went to their dad and Tom came to me. We were not one big happy family — but we did have some happy times.
Jim and I married in 1999 and Leila was a bridesmaid. Aged just ten, she delivered a brief, gabbled speech, telling the guests how happy she was to have me as a stepmother. I clutched her to me, ruining my make-up crying onto her shoulder.
Our bond deepened. When she was bullied, aged 12, she came home crying and told me first.
ONCE she hit her teens and the house was filled with hormones and body spray, I was the one who explained what she might be feeling to her frustrated dad.
I never shouted at her, retreating into silence when I felt angry. In retrospect, that was unwise. I was afraid of losing her love, but looking back, perhaps this somehow contributed to her feeling I wasn’t fully committed as a parent.
Still, on her 16th birthday she wrote me the most beautiful poem, thanking me for raising her. When she found herself pregnant at 23, I was deeply honoured when she asked me to be her birth partner, though, in the event, her father and I were stuck in a traffic jam and it was Leila’s mother-inlaw who was there. By then, I thought our bond was inviolable. Leila had long known my relationship with her dad wasn’t perfect.
She had overheard rows and could tell things were strained.
We’d always rowed, money and work problems were constant and problems with exes on both sides caused dissent. When the children left home in 2011, it was increasingly clear our marriage was troubled. During a bad patch when Jim and I were rowing a lot, I tentatively asked how she’d feel if the worst happened.
‘It’d be sad, but if you’re not happy . . .’ she said. ‘You’d still be my other mum.’
I was so reassured — she would still consider herself my daughter. That’s how I thought of her. When people asked me how many children I had, I always said ‘two’.
In 2013, my marriage careered off the road.
We had tried counselling, separation, moving house. I had given up — but despite everything, Jim hadn’t. So when I finally left, he was distraught and turned to the person closest to him: Leila.
At 26 she is fiery and forthright; I was braced for her rage. I didn’t expect her silence. I sent her messages saying I didn’t believe her dad and I could ever be happy together, but I desperately wanted to be in her life.
It wasn’t just her. I dearly loved her 18-month-old daughter, Lizzy, to whom I was a step-gran at 43.
Tom, at university, was sad but stoical. He and Jim stayed friends and Leila and Tom are still, at least on social media, friends too.
But she wouldn’t talk to me. I only knew this because Jim told me. He and I still talked because we had to discuss money and practical matters. He even said he’d tried to get her to speak to me: ‘But ultimately, it’s her choice.’
I was estranged from the woman I thought of as a daughter. My heart had left the marriage but hadn’t left her. Overnight, I had destroyed a relationship that had taken years to build.
I understood her l oyalty to Jim. I knew I hadn’t handled the split well, but I was shocked at her rigidity.
Over the past 18-plus months, I have endlessly hoped Leila will change her mind. At a wedding Jim and I were at in the summer, drunk, I begged him to explain why she wouldn’t speak to me. He sighed. ‘ She just doesn’t think there’s much point,’ he said.
HER sisters and I were never as close, though I often have dreams about meeting them again.
I have cried a river over losing Leila. Sometimes I think I’m OK, then suddenly something derails me, like hearing the song Tiny Dancer in a John Lewis insurance advert. It was one of Leila’s favourites, and I began to cry before I even knew why.
I’m crying now, thinking of the Christmases we won’t share, the milestones of Lizzy’s I won’t see, and the terrible, sad waste of a relationship I cherished.
I know splitting up with Jim was the right thing to do. But the price I paid was my stepdaughter.
So many second marriages fail — often, ironically, due to the pressures of a step-family.
I can’t be alone in this, but I feel I am. There are no guidelines for what to do when a daughter who was never really yours rejects you.
All I can do is hope that she knows I love her. And if she ever needs me I’ll still be there, however long it takes. * SOME names have been changed