When my mother died, I didn’t think my stepfather would ever find someone else to love. She met him when visiting New York and he moved to Paris to live with us. He’d always ask: “How’d this gorgeous French-Brazilian woman pick me?” They shared 16 beautiful years together. On the night of her death, he told me he’d “lost 40 years”, the years of them growing old together.
As much as I wanted him to be happy, I never imagined their connection could be replaced, it just seemed too strong. So when, one spring evening over dinner, he said “I went on a date last night” to my little sister and me, my eyes grew wide in shock. I was pleased for him, but devastated for myself. It felt like another era was coming to an end.
I met my stepfather when I was four. He was a white Irish lad, I was a multicultural girl. He spoke English, I spoke French. When he moved into the apartment I had shared with my mother and father before they split up, I rejected him, thinking he was trying to replace my dad.
He likes to tell the story of one of the first times he took me to school. According to him, I screamed the whole way from our apartment to the school gates, which was just across the street but must’ve felt like miles to him. In the elevator, a man eyed him sideways, as if to ask, are you kidnapping this child? When we got to the door, I said “non, pas lui” (no, not him), to the security guard, barring him from entering my school. “I was gutted,” he often says.
That’s how our relationship started, but soon he learned French and cried when mentioning me in his wedding speech. I started to like him. I learned English when we moved to New York. He cooked my dinners, he biked me to the school bus every morning, he danced with me. Over the years he became just as much a father as my biological one and I thanked my mother for bringing him into our lives.
So in 2021, two years after my mother died, when he brought someone home to meet us, I welcomed her with open arms. I didn’t want him to carry any more guilt from moving forward than he already had, but I also felt an urge to keep a close eye on her. You know the saying, keep your friends close and keep the lover of your mother’s widower closer. After dinner, she thanked me for the warm welcome, adding: “I respect your mother and the life she built.”
I was impressed and confused by her self-awareness, because while I had expected to talk with her, to scrutinise her, I hadn’t expected to actually like her. She seemed kind but, even so, after our initial meeting, I started searching for everything that could be wrong with her. She was incredibly giving. She picked my little sister up from my place, she offered me a job, she helped my roommate find a dog – no one is that generous, I thought. For a while, I kept searching for the hidden reasons behind her kindness, but it became harder the closer we grew.
Connecting with her felt like cheating on my mother. Whenever we enjoyed wine on her back deck and I found myself laughing at her jokes, I felt a ping of remorse. When we had lunch at Balthazar, I told myself it was OK because we sat at the bar and my mother and I always got a table. When she handed me a pair of shoes for Christmas, I cried, because they were the perfect gift. It was becoming unbearable to try to hate a woman I had started to love.
One evening, she opened up about all the rude things people had said to her since she’d been with my stepfather and I finally saw how hard it must have been for her to date a widower with overprotective children and friends. It was the wakeup call I needed to let down my guard.
I realised that while she wouldn’t have entered our lives if my mother hadn’t left, none of us had chosen these circumstances. I realised that this new woman wasn’t trying to replace anyone, that she respected the life we had before her, and simply loved my stepdad and his three daughters. I realised that some people truly are that generous, that it was OK for me to let her in. I had always known that my mother would be thrilled that we had met someone who brought some light into our lives after such darkness, but it took me time to push the guilt aside enough to welcome this someone in.
My biological father used to say: “Love doesn’t get divided, it gets multiplied.” Back when I tried to hate my stepfather’s new partner, I thought “I already have four parents, I don’t need another one.” Now I marvel at the improbability that I could be be blessed with two parents at birth, two stepparents by age five, and yet another parental figure at age 20. Weekly calls and family holidays have become regular parts of our relationship. Learning that it wasn’t a question of replacement, of division, helped me embrace this new kind of bond, one that doesn’t need a clearcut definition.
Iman M’Fah-Traoré is a writer. She is working on her first book, a memoir
