My Stepdaughter is One of My Best Friends
And I love our relationship.
On Monday, my stepdaughter “K” and I did yoga together over video-chat, something we’d organized the day before while doing embarrassing gymnastics and dance moves in my mother-in-law’s backyard. I’m thirty, she’s eighteen (almost nineteen), and I think we bring out the best in each other.
I’ve been in K’s life since shortly after she turned twelve, but she never lived with me and my partner. I entered just at the tail end of her childhood years, and although I look back at pictures and see how young she was then, she still wasn’t young enough that I ever filled a maternal role.
It was always sort of unclear what role I was meant to play in her life. But I’d liked her from the beginning, and it didn’t take long to start to feel very protective of her. I had that feeling of wanting to give her whatever I could — wanting to contribute to her life in ways that would make her happy and be affirming.
For a couple of years, we baked, made craft projects, and played games on the Sundays I came over. A lot of it, things K and I both liked, was the type of thing I’d done with my mom in the years before my little brothers were born.
Later in her high school days, K unsurprisingly got busier, and I had more on my plate too. There was…
