It’s Miranda, my stepsister.
When I came home last summer, Mom and Miranda and I took a trip down to Charleston and toured the city and had a spa day and ate amazing food and shared a vacation rental house and laughed and talked for hours.
Miranda was six to my thirteen when Mom married Roland, and we only saw her every other weekend and a few weeks every summer, so we weren’t tight before I left for culinary school. She graduated college right before our trip last year. It was fun to reconnect and spend time getting to know her as an adult, and we’ve texted and kept up on socials more in the past year than we ever did before. We even started talking about a vacation, just the two of us, or Miranda flying to Europe and coming on one of my cruises.
And now, the baby has changed everything.
Clearly, Miranda isn’t coming to the Med. Mom’s not talking about girls’ trips with both of us. She’s not talking about her ladies’ club and their volunteer activities. She’s not even talking about introducing me to her book club.
She’s talking about diapers and cribs and playrooms and how stressed I’ll be without any time for myself.
She’s talking about buying me a mansion so that I’ll never have to worry about running out of space.
And all I want is a girls’ trip to make me feel normal.
Like I haven’t completely upended my life.
Like I still have friends I can trust in my life, even if they’re related to me and I don’t want to live with one of them.
Call me when you’re done, Miranda’s text says.We’ll get ice cream and I’ll tell you all about our parents’ plans to build a littlecarriage house at the back of their property so that you and the baby are always there.
I eye my mom.
Then Niki, who’s one of Mom’s friends from her garden club.
My phone buzzes again.
Miranda:In case you missed the subtle hint, once you check into the Parental Unit Hotel, they’re never letting you leave.
Miranda isn’t saying anything I haven’t known on some level. It’s the bigger reason I got a hotel room instead of staying with them when I got home.
I know my parents love me. I know I’m incredibly lucky to get along with both my mom and my stepdad. I didn’t take his last name, but I do call himDadwhen we’re together, and it fits.
He took me to dance classes. He showed up with Mom at nearly every one of my high school plays. He taught me to play chess and drove me to school early so I could take extra language classes—my choice—and he had more patience than my friends’ parents when I was deep in the throes of puberty with mood swings and breakdowns.
Miranda says he handled her teenage years well too, even if he was overbearing about her boyfriends, which I also experienced firsthand.
But despite me leaving home at eighteen for culinary school and moving to Europe at twenty-three with my first cruise line contract, my parents are struggling with the idea that I’m a grown woman who can choose to raise a baby on my own.
They’ve convinced themselves I was at sleepaway camp when I was working onboard and that I’m still a teenager.
I want my parents to once again be who they were when I was an actual teenager.
Except for the overbearing with the dating part.
I could do without my stepfather staring silently at every boy who came to pick me up for a dance or a movie or a picnic.
I’m not good enough for your mother, so how do you expect me to ever believe any of these immature balls of hormones are good enough for you?
It was endearing once.
By the time I left home, I was thrilled to not have to introduce dates to my parents.
Not that I dated a lot.
I’m apparentlytoo picky. Abby Nora called me that once and I thought it was funny.
Now I wonder if she’s right. And also if it was meant as an insult.
