Someone was bound to get hurt here, and it’s probably going to be the one who doesn’t have a true invitation to the holiday dinner. As the middle one once again, I sought peace for all where no peace had been for years. I wanted the kids to wake up and hurry toward the tree, with mom, dad, and dad’s new girlfriend all anxiously sipping eggnog and starting sentences with words like: “Remember when he called you last year and you wondered why he couldn’t remember the name of his hotel?”

I wanted his parents to stop calling me by Her name as they beckoned me to help set the table.

I looked toward a peace treaty with Her so the kids could grow up and become healthy, emotionally stable adults who didn’t celebrate anniversary dates on a fourteen-month bigamy calendar.

I didn’t want to see the video of the how the little humans who stared at me with contempt were barely bloody specs on their mother’s lifeless breasts…. the ant bites that comprised a broader package deal that sent him looking elsewhere.

But as the step-mother (egad!), the “girl her precious son is courting,” “the bitch that stole my husband,” the girlfriend, the soulmate, the hot babe, the whore… how do I see anything BUT the middle from the middle?

I fought for the children as I remembered a lost childhood with no father; a mom with no money and a child to raise; the hatred toward any new person entangled with their mom or dad; the feeling of “why do I have to change schools, clothes, friends, because you ‘two’ fucked up?”

I identified with Her in order to get him to understand me better.

I fought for Her as I remembered my mom capitulated into darkness; me seeing my father farther down our friendly neighbor’s throat than I had ever seen with my mom; the desperation that a woman felt losing her man to another younger woman who had spent her spare time working on making her body harder instead of stretching it out on the delivery table; the helplessness she must have felt realizing she put her dreams aside to raise a family, never thinking that the venom she shot out at her man would send him into the arms of an independent, forward-thinking woman with no concept whatsoever of preserving the family… something she thought he loved in her. Something for which he would stay.

I fought. Period.

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