Is It Real?

Recently, while I was upstairs installing a Carbon Monoxide detector, my wife was in the basement having a conversation with the eldest daughter. I was unaware of this as I was drilling holes to insert things in walls. Very manly work. Also dusty. I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s why I’m building my own robot.

Anyway, Matilda was talking to her mom about things. Emotional things.

“Gertrude’s closer to daddy than me,” Matilda said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she’s his real daughter and I’m just his step-daughter.”

Imagine taking off all of your clothes, flying down to the South Pole and jumping naked into a hole drilled into the ice shelf filled with water that is barely above the freezing point.

I imagine that it would feel very much like getting hit by a bus.

That’s how hearing about this conversation felt.

Now, I’m sure it has nothing with how our relationship is actually developing. I’m sure that there isn’t anything that I’ve done wrong, or for that matter, right in the last several months. Perhaps she picked up the idea that she is “just” my step daughter from her bio-dad or someone in his family. We certainly never note that she and I don’t share DNA. There’s no question in my head that she’s my daughter. But she’s afraid that I’m just going to forget about her and choose her sister as my favorite.

Of course, this isn’t true. In fact, the only thing that I do differently is laugh at the baby when she runs around naked and tell Matilda to have some humility when she runs around naked. But that’s an age thing.

The concept of a parent loving you less than your younger sibling is a foreign concept to me. I’ve never had a younger sibling. Instead I have seven older siblings. So instead of worrying about how much my parents loved me, I worried about getting as much food as possible on my first serving because if I didn’t, the food would be gone and I’d have to subsist on eating my brother’s discarded pudding skin.

So this sort of worry is new to me. How do I quell her fears? I have no idea.

If I change my behavior that will seem to be confirming her fears. If I do nothing it’ll be like I didn’t hear her concern.

Is this a natural concern of children of “mixed” families? I’ve been acting as her father since she was two years old. That’s a long time. Sure, we fight sometimes, but I’ve always tried to make sure that she has the life she deserves and have worked as hard as I could to provide her with every opportunity in life. That’s my job. I’m a dad.

We read Harry Potter together, watch movies together, read Lemony Snicket, I make her CDs, we see movies and go to museums. We hatch evil plans together and don’t tell Mom. We run out in the dark of night to go see the mysterious fire works display off in the distance. We look up at the sky at Mars.

It’s not like I lock her in her room and only play with the baby. So what brought on the fear?

My personal thought is her obsession with books about orphans. She loves books about orphans. The Little Princess (though she’s a pseudo-orphan), Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Heidi, The Box Car Children, one of the American Girls . . . She’s obsessed with orphans.

Maybe she’s wishing I’ll be an evil step-father because that means that she’ll be revealed to be a rich princess who is the rightful air to the crystal castle in the sky.

Probably not. Most likely it’s just the typical fears of an eight-year-old.

Until I figure it out, I’ll be out buying her a pony.