In 2023, I thought a lot about my wicked stepmother

Published on 9 December 2023

In April this year, I saw you.

I was sitting outside a coffee shop, and as I glanced up from my laptop, there you were. I don’t know if you saw me, but if you did then you pretended not to. 

I’ve thought about seeing you many times over the years, about what I would say to you, or if I would say anything at all. But nowhere, in amongst all my imaginings about this moment, did I account for the way that seeing you would shrink me.

I pictured myself as strong. A grown woman now, ready to look you in the eye, to stand face to face with you and say “I remember all of it. I know what you are. You and I know, even if no one else in the world does. You can’t trick me now.”

But in that moment, watching you walk up to the counter, fishing for your card in your purse, and ordering your tea without looking at me, I shrank.

Suddenly I was six again, so scared and uncertain of myself, and you were mighty, impossible to decipher and terrifying all the same.

I remember the first time we met. My feet in socks and trainers, swinging against my Dad’s seat. The back of your head in the front of the car, as we drove to that stately home and its gardens to get to know each other. Did I know somehow, even then, what was coming?

I remember the first secret you gave me to carry. 

It was a Sunday morning, and Dad had gone out to buy a newspaper. You suggested we go sit in the garden and have a chat. And then you said it.

“I know you don’t like me.”

I can still hear it. The knowing in your voice. Sneering. That tonal upper hand.

“I know you don’t like me, but I’m not going anywhere.” 

And it was as strange to me then as it is now. I didn’t know what you meant. I didn’t know what it was to not like a grown up. I didn’t know that was a choice I had, and knowing who I was as a child, I doubt it would have even occurred to me.

You never told me not to tell anyone about our conversation, but somehow I knew. I had been bad, and telling someone that you’d seen right through me would mean they would, too. So I kept it to myself. Our little secret.

You got braver and braver after that. Emboldened by my silence.

And you were smart about it, careful to tread that line between playful teasing and bullying.

When you locked me in the bathroom and turned all the lights out: it was just a joke.

When you asked me if I’d ever heard the expression “put a sock in it”, and demonstrated by shoving a dirty sock down my throat until I gagged and my eyes watered: it was just a joke.

When you punched my beloved teddy bear over and over and over in front of my best friend, and I pretended to laugh along while I broke inside and fought back tears: it was just a joke.

Your relentless three-year campaign to teach me that I was difficult, too sensitive, and weak: it was just a joke.

It was just a joke, you said, and I believed you. Grown ups know best, after all. It took me so many years and hundreds of hours of patient therapy, to call it what it really was: abuse.

I don’t remember the day you left. Maybe my Dad finally sensed what you were doing to me. Maybe he got bored of you. Maybe you kicked and screamed and protested, or maybe you went quietly. One day you just weren’t there anymore. 

Maybe I won, in the end, but the truth is that I’m not sure either of us did.

You went your way with wicked secrets and heartbreak, your failed efforts to wrench the man you loved from his daughter.

And I went my way with labels that made me despise myself: Needy, fragile, selfish, bad.

In June this year, I told Dad.

We were sitting in a pub and I said that I’d seen you, and I told him, trying to keep my voice light and nonchalant, what you had done.

And I didn’t know, until that very moment, how badly I needed the words he said:

“I had no idea.”

That bone-deep fear I’d harboured all these years, that he knew and he didn’t save me, was gone. And with it, so were you.