Meeting Daniel was the best thing that has ever happened to me. We met when he started working at the company where I had been employed for quite some time. He was a widower with a daughter. Our relationship blossomed, and I was praying that my stepdaughter accepted me. But things didn’t turn out that way, until my 55th birthday arrived.
When I met Emily for the first time, she was reserved. But I understood how she felt. After all, she was just a 12-year-old who had lost her mother. That loss change her life and her world.
Over time, Daniel and I got engaged and then married. My relationship with Emily remained the same as day one. We were never close although I did my best to enter her world. No matter her indifference, I never lost hope she would eventually accept me fully.
Don’t get me wrong, Emily was never rude to me. On the contrary, she was always kind, but never affectionate or approachable.
A couple of years into my marriage to Daniel, he lost his life in a car crash. My world collapsed. It was just Emily and I.
After the funeral, my stepdaughter approached me with teary eyes and asked, “What do we do now?”
I took her hand and said in a comforting voice, “Now we stick together. We are a family and we’ll get through it.”
I believed that my relationship with Emily would change after the tragedy which was supposed to unite us in shared grief. But once again, I was wrong. Emily enrolled in college and moved out of the house, and the gap between us widened.
The calls were few and the visits even fewer. And then, on my 55th birthday, Emily called me and said she wanted to treat me to a nice dinner. I was both glad and surprised, because the only thing I had ever gotten from my stepdaughter on my birthdays was a card.
But this time was different. I was waiting for Emily to arrive, and she came in a brand new cabriolet. I believed the car was a rental, because she didn’t have a car, but then she handed me the keys and said, “This is for you. For your birthday.”
I took the keys and thanked her, a bit shocked by her gesture.
The dinner was quiet. We didn’t talk much. I asked Emily about college and her answers were short and reserved.
When we headed home, she said there was yet another gift for me inside the glove compartment. As we pulled into the driveway, I reached to the compartment and saw a stack of papers. Those were drawings Emily made when she was still a teenager. On each of them, she drew herself, her father, and me, and each figure that represented me was labeled “mom.”
I was confused. “You see,” she said as she turned to me, “I always considered you a mom, but I never told you that because I believed I would betray the memory of my biological mom.”
With teary eyes, Emily added, “Thank you for everything. For your immense support and love, and for never stopped trying to be the best mother anyone could ask for.”
I hugged Emily tightly. All the walls between us seemed to crumble in an instant.
Finally, after years of uncertainty, my stepdaughter and I became a family in the true sense.
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