"Evil" Stepmother

A person, they say, learns trust and other values in his early childhood. That wasn’t the case for me though because at the tender age of six, I learned to mistrust, be wary of and even be angry at some people.

Mom’s the second wife, you see, and this put her in the category of the “evil” stepmother. The children, my half siblings, were actually nice (I think children by nature are nice except when they were through some painful experiences like I was). It was the people around them who weren’t. In the neighborhood lived the sister of the first wife and she would tell my sister (I never referred to them as half sisters or brother except when I need to be politically correct) who was under her care to not go to our house. She forbade her to play with us and would go ballistic if she found out that my sister visited us.

Tongues kept wagging too. People talked about my mom a lot, always portraying her in a negative light. Some even went as far as saying that even when the first wife was still alive, she and daddy already had an affair. There were talks too about her being after my dad’s money.

I was only a child then but I was a child who was sensitive and very astute. Children are more susceptible to pain and so that time, I was the one grieving for my mom. There was even a time when I overheard a mother of a playmate said this to her son, “Don’t play with her because she is not nice. Like mother, like daughter.” Needless to say, I was raving mad. Why said such an absurdity to a child? What did we, innocent kids, know of or do to deserve that?!

Mom was very civil and polite about everything. She was too nice to a fault. She just told me to understand and forgive people, to make allowances for them. That they may say whatever they wanted to say but these really didn’t matter because we ourselves knew the truth.

I took my mom’s advice at heart but I vowed to myself to never fully trust people. I knew what people were capable of so I built walls around myself to shield myself from pains.

Not all people are cruel, of course, this being in line with the truth that not all stepmothers are “evil.” Mom was the best of mothers. I am my mother’s daughter, all right and I am so damned proud to be that. Like mother and daughter? I sure hope so because mom, unlike me, was very forgiving and the epitome of kindness and generosity. And these traits are what I hope to emulate always.

Now if only I can shed off my being jaded and cynical about people…