Yours and Mine

‘Yours and mine never works’ my best friend’s mother casually said to me as she poured me a warm cup of tea on an otherwise ordinary afternoon after school. I had been confiding in her about my own tumultuous relationship with my stepmother at the time. Her words deeply embedded in my conscious. My own lived experiences with past and present stepmothers at the time seemed to strongly confirm her sentiments. It was these lived experiences of other mothers as I had experienced them- not quite stepmothers, but mothers of others- that caused me to make a solemn promise to myself never to become a stepmother myself. After all, yours and mine never works, I reminded myself.

Years went by and I indeed honoured the sacred promise that I had made to myself as a fifteen-year-old girl. Until one day when I met the love of my life. One of the first questions that I posed to him when we met was: ‘Do you have a child or children?’ I silently prayed that his answer would be a solid ‘No.’ Well, it was not. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘a son, he is ten years old.’ ‘Whoa!’ Too bad, I thought to myself. Another one bites the dust. I really liked him, but I could not and did not, want to break the sacred promise that I had made to myself.’ After all, yours and mine never works, I reminded myself. Or does it?

It has been four beautiful, complicated, layered, and complex years of my life as a partner in this dynamic that is my family, our family. The complexities of being a young, childless, black woman who is partnered by a man who is a father, can be a rollercoaster ride. By childless I do not mean to imply that motherhood can only manifest itself through the biological conception and birth of a child, what I mean is that I do not identify as a mother, per se. Nor am I completely comfortable with the title of stepmother. Yet somewhere in between, somewhere in the grey area between yours and mine, is me and ours, and that is where I am.

Bell Hooks reminds us that patriarchy has no gender, and in my own experience of me and yours, me and you, and our family- I have come to learn that what matters most is love. I love my partner’s son, our son. We are a family. Our journey to becoming a family was not without all the elements of heartbreak/conflict and pain from the ending of a previous relationship. We cannot escape the reality that often for blended families to form and exist, a former so called conventional family had to end.

It is also not lost on me that most of the initial tension/discomfort or even downright conflict or ongoing war (for lack of a better word) that exists between the biological parent of the child who may also be the former partner, and the new partner in the picture- do not exist in a vacuum outside of the constructs and realities of patriarchy, and our own cultural and religious normative beliefs and values.

It has been four years since I have broken a promise that I had made to myself as a fifteen-year-old girl. A promise that I had made to protect others from me possibly inflicting unto them, the same pain of othering that I had experienced at the hands of other mothers in my own life. At the time I did not trust that I had it in me not to project or play out what had been done to me. Yet here I am all these glorious years later, enriched by the life that my partner, our son, and I weave so lovingly and joyfully every single day of our lives, together.

So, does yours and mine work after all?

I will never know. What I do know is that my life has been infinitely enriched by the love of my life and our son. We are a family that loves each other, and that is what works.

By Reabetswe Matseleng Seakeco