Dad's Beautiful Collection of Dolls: Wife # 3, Amanda
Despite what they'll tell you, as step-children, we know we'll never fully make our way into their circle of belonging.
Author’s note: This collection of events is a culmination of memory & experience— subjective and written through the lens of a young child. This piece does not represent any one human named nor does it claim to be an accurate representation of anyone else’s reality.
Amanda was my dad’s third wife, the one he married right before he went to prison for drinking and driving, and lost all his money. All of his wives were beautiful in their own way. Quite the charmer, my dad, with his other-worldly smarts, dimples and blue eyes as crystal bright as the ocean, especially when the whites of his eyes tinged pink from the drink. I always envied his eyes, none of us kids got the sparkle but instead a deep and flat gray.
His wives were like a collection of beautiful dolls:
My mom, the first wife, was timid yet fierce. A short, athletic and muscular redhead. Sue, his other woman, was the tall, dark, boisterous and most handsome of them all– her eyes were deep and piercing and her legs were at least 5 feet long. Amanda, the third, was a whopping 13 years younger than dad! She was shy and goofy. A conspiracy theorist. Anxious. She had the biggest damn boobies I’d ever seen on such a small person. In a bra with a bright white tucked-in t-shirt, they could just about poke your eye out, but at home they hung down to at least her belly button– something I thought to be hilarious as she danced and flung them about.
Amanda was my step-mom for the longest amount of time, and felt more like an older cousin than a mom. Amanda had sandy blonde pin-straight hair that she would flip over the side, teasing only the bangs in the front like a single feather perched atop her forehead. A way my mom would never. Her lips were naturally dark pink, and swollen– the kind of lips girls these days would take pictures of to their nurse injector. They were plump and perfectly lined with her dark brown eyebrow pencil. “Eyebrow liner lasts longer than lip-liner” she would state, sliding the pencil into her red Marlboro box and slipping the box into her waitress apron.
She was only 24 when they wed, after much pressure from all 4 of us kids, two of us hers, two of us his. He of course, on his third marriage, she on her second, decided a snowy February courthouse wedding would suffice. Only us girls and a relative or two in attendance.
The rundown of children of The Loud Family is as follows:
Alex, short for Alexandria Jade, now goes by “Allie” which I still forget to use– she is the resident eldest, who was a mere 52 days older than me. She was Amanda’s first from when she was a teenager. Alex had never met her dad, and to this day she and I concluded that just like Lindsey Lohan in the Parent Trap– we must have been separated at birth.
Then there was me, Madison Marie, or as my dad calls P.J. Short for Pride And Joy. I was my dad’s from his first marriage, the one he “really fucked up.” He still apologizes for it almost very time we speak. Based on the way I could and still can do no wrong, I was his clear favorite. (I am still not sure if I’m his favorite because we look alike, act alike, are both autistic, or just because of his painstaking guilt and regret for what he did to my mom).
Then there was Alyssa Jay, Alex’s half sister from Amanda’s first marriage to the rock-n’-roller hippie Bob. I never liked Bob, but I’m not sure if my opinion was my own, or if I inherited it from being a little too close to adult conversations. It was obvious to me even as a child that he was a try-hard; I never gave him a lick of my attention. Truthfully, I may have just been jealous because unlike my dad, he’d take Alex and Alyssa on fancy vacations. Cruises, DisneyLand, the Caribbean, carnivals, the tallest rollercoaster in the world... I didn’t get vacations like that as a kid. They’d come back with their white hair beaded, dark and tan with iPods and jelly shoes. Anyway, Alyssa shared his white hair and impressionability. Alex shared his much too cool for me music taste.
Next there was Madeline, who now goes by Maddie just like me. Maddie is my dad’s daughter from the woman he cheated on my mom with. That’s Sue, my dad’s running partner. Apparently it didn’t occur to Sue that Madeline and Madison are far too similar. To this day when asked about the oddity of two children called Maddie Barrow, my dad throws up his arms and says, “you know how wives are!! I didn’t even have a say!!” Madeline is only 36 days younger than Alyssa, and among us, she was the largest child. A tank. She was also the quietest, a bookworm, something I always attributed to the fact that Sue went back to Ron after she divorced my dad and had 2 more kids– one of whom, Morgan, had muscular dystrophy and took all the attention Sue had, having become the national spokesperson for the sickness. Sue softened after Morgan was born, but unfortunately Madeline was often dropped off at dad’s for Amanda to entertain while they whisked Morgan away to DisneyLand for special needs events. Madeline, like me, belonged to a family that was already complete even without her there.
Then there was Andrew, aka Drew, and according to Amanda, never, ever Andy. Drew was born when Alex and I were 10– he was the glue, the baby sibling we all shared. We carried him around like our own little rag doll. Drew was shy, as a boy with 4 older sisters would be.
I’d be happy to tell you about the pets too, but I think you might have enough names to remember by now. Just for shits and giggles, know one of the cats was named W… George W.
Back before dad went to prison, got sober, and was born again, Amanda was a single mom of 2, waitressing at the pizza bar he frequented. I was thrilled when she moved into his big empty house, the one he had to buy back from Sue in the divorce.
When Amanda moved in, the empty 5 bedroom house became a home again. Amanda filled the rooms with canopy beds, frilly, shabby-chic comforters and all things floral. Somehow, with all those bedrooms, the playroom basement and all the space to run and play, I never had a space of my own. Amanda was known for throwing my toothbrushes away when I’d leave, then lying about it. She wouldn’t even let me decorate the guest room, “The Green Room” - wallpapered, carpeted and bedded a minty-sage green. Let alone leave my things in that damn room between visits. I lugged it all back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Best to keep our things separate. Our lives separate. Our families separate. Belonging was transient, and that's okay because I was adaptable. I knew how to be appropriate and blend in wherever I went.
To Amanda’s dismay, my father had never disciplined me– for anything. Usually sneaking beers in the evening and watching baseball as loud as the TV could go, he was too checked out to care what I did the weekends I visited– and I knew it. It’s not like he didn’t love me or anything, it's that he was exhausted from a week in telephone sales, working to pay thousands in child support to my mom and Sue, plus Amanda’s kids. That must have been why Amanda had separate cereal for us when we came for the weekend. Name brand was for her children only.
At my mom’s house I was an avid rule-follower terrified of getting in trouble. Here, the band of us kids were feral heathens, and I took full advantage. Wiping my play-makeup into the Pepto Bismol pink carpets, I’d tell Amanda with indignation, “my dad doesn’t care, he said I could.” I wasn’t wrong nor lying. He said I could.
Madeline and I, the resident weekend visitors, would wind up sleeping in the basement on the couches, or under Alex’s fancy pull out canopy bed. Or anywhere we’d run ourselves ragged enough to finally crash into sleep. I’d go back to my mom’s house on Sunday afternoons not having showered in 3 days (unless Amanda gave all of us girls a big bubbly bath in their jacuzzi tub). I’d return only having eaten cereal and Imo’s– that famous cracker-style St. Louis pizza with provel cheese. Mom would coach me on washing and rinsing all my “crevices;” she’d check me when I returned, making sure there was no private part discomfort. We kids ran wild, making potions of dirt, leaves and sewer water. Roaming the cornfields behind the new up-and-coming subdivision, the one that would eventually be made into a schmancy park. (I liked it better when it was mostly dirt, corn and gravel– where I’d prove I was the fastest runner in the neighborhood by running barefoot against the boys on bikes.)
We were loud, dirty, unbathed feral children running on 3 hours of sleep all weekend. I loved it.
Amanda would keep us up late, hours past our bedtime filling us in on adult gossip, horrifying us with stories of her time at a nursing home, cleaning up after the patients who smeared poop on the walls and telling spooky stories of aliens and government conspiracies. She was known to say the strangest things like, “I’d rather have acne than freckles, at least acne goes away” and “I hope Drew doesn’t inherit your father’s coarse and fuzzy hair!” As a freckled-faced kid with my dad’s big frizzy curls, I never made sense of how an adult wouldn’t know this sort of thing was rude! I, for the life of me, can't remember where my dad was during these late night sleepovers.
Most weekends I would find myself wide-eyed and the only one awake at 2am in the large, haunting basement staring into the glow of the movie credits of Austin Powers, or Spice World, on the largest 90’s big-screen Mitsubishi TV. The house was so enormous I once convinced myself that Dad and Amanda had disappeared, and left us kids completely alone. Terrified of the silent, lonely darkness, sometimes I’d call my mom to come get me. She’d make the 45 minute drive to his house, showing up in pajamas with that exhausted, downturned look on her face with eyelids fluttering as my dad opened the door. I’d always fall asleep on the drive home. The come-down would be more of a meltdown. Mom says it would take me days to be myself again. I’d come home a tiny, eruptive end to their weekend of peace. It was better for all of them when I wasn’t around. I’d leave and they’d finally find relief, only to have me return in a frenzy.
I remember once Madeline’s mom, Sue, used my honesty about all this to get money from my dad in court. How was I to know her questions weren’t benevolent!? I didn’t understand what the big deal was… we didn’t have a place of our own, but we were having fun.
Dad was so angry. This was the only time he yelled at me, and truthfully, I laughed.
All of us kids laughed– Amanda too.
All these memories were now flooding back as we sat around a table at Madeline’s wedding for the first time in a decade, (plus Gina, Dad’s new wife) with that perfect June breeze and fluffy white cake on our plates. Spilling memory after memory into our re-filled wine glasses, trying to find something to talk about that would bind us back together. We were such different people now.
Amanda has always been known to loosen up after a few glasses. One year, she got so drunk she kissed my dad’s younger brother Timmy on the mouth. He’s in jail now, and all this was before I knew it wasn’t okay to sit on his lap. I was 9 and remember this party vividly; not only because of the drama, nor because it was new years eve of 1999 and we were afraid all the computers would stop working at midnight, but also because I had pink-eye and dad wouldn’t let me come unless I wore some hideous eye-patch they taped to my face. I was humiliated to look so ugly on a holiday! But my mom had plans, so someone had to take me.
A bottle of wine in now at the reception and perhaps feeling frisky, Amanda leans over to me and with the softest voice says,
“I’ve been bathing your grandma Mary Lou every week. You know, in her Alzheimer's silliness, how she sings? She is such a ham– the center of attention. It reminds me so much of you as a kid…
…Can you believe when I was your age, I had all 5 of you kids at home?”
That made her only 27, with 5 children.
It never occurred to me that she was only my age.
Amanda, although divorced from my dad for a decade, was still bathing my dad’s mom after all these years. I’d never considered that she actually cared for me, let alone paid enough attention to have any sense of fondness for how I was as a child. I hadn’t heard from her, not a text, card or phone call in years. Maybe ten? Maybe more. I was 16 when she left my dad; he came home to a completely empty house on Halloween ready to take my brother trick or treating. When my mom told me, I sobbed. My heart still aches thinking of him opening the door and realizing all at once his family was gone. Amanda never reached out. Neither did her kids. And honestly, I left for college a year later, putting it all behind me for good. Last I went to her house to see my little brother, she took a shower for the full hour and a half I had planned to be there. It was like her to hide because of anxiety, so I didn’t take it personally.
There’s just so much to not take personally.
Despite the chasm of time, distance and disconnection, the thought of her washing my frail, delirious elderly grandma twice a week made me want to cry. Only want to, because I would never cry in front of her.
Come to think of it, I still haven’t seen or heard from Amanda since that day in 2018. The last time I visited my dad he told me she continued to bathe little Mary Lou a few summers longer until she passed.
While we don’t talk, I think of her when I wash my hair. She always wanted the water smoldering hot to rinse out all the conditioner so we wouldn’t have a greasy head. I wonder if she said the same things to my grandma, who became more like a little girl than a woman at the end.
I wonder if she thinks of me as she bathes her grand-babies. I wonder if I belong to her idea of family, or if I was just some annoying kid she babysat, passing through her house a couple times a month. I wonder if she loves me, or ever really did; Dad isn’t sure her heart could. I wonder if she thinks of me at all or if it makes her sad if she thinks of those nights we stayed up until 3am, gossiping and laughing.
It’s not like she was my family, really. But it’s not like she wasn’t, either.
There was some liminal kind of belonging that braided us together, just for a moment in time. In some ways it’s all made me really good at letting go; being willing to move on, start over, & not taking life so damn personally. But close up, it’s made me real shit at trusting the web of belonging I’ve woven for myself.
Step-parenting, I hear, is the hardest job in the world. You’re not really allowed to admit it out loud, but they never love the other kids as much as they love their own. We all know. I wish they would just say it and stop pretending until it’s all over.
As step-children, we know we'll never fully make our way into their circle of belonging.
We never fully make our way into their family Christmas cards, or get invited to reunions of any kind, or get updates on what is happening with the family. Maybe every few years someone mentions us as a faint memory. Maybe they pull up our Facebook photos up just to see how we are. Maybe she knows I’m gay now— that’s the kind of news that get’s around. Maybe I’ll see her at a wedding; she couldn’t make my last one, I don’t remember why. But if I’m lucky to ever be wed again, maybe she will come to the next.
I’m just speculating now, because the truth is, I wanted her to love me. Desperately.
Even if she never could let me into her heart I’m thankful for the way she poured that water lightly over my head. Even if she never loved me, she still covered my forehead with her left hand making sure my eyes wouldn’t burn as the slippery conditioner water dripped down my back; the same way she did to my sisters, the same way she did to teeny Mary Lou.
That’s a kind of love, even at a forever distance, even if it’s never spoken, even if there’s never genuine familial belonging, that still makes me cry.
“The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves…
There is some innocent childlike side to the human heart that is always deeply hurt when we are excluded. Belonging suggest warmth, understanding and embrace. No one was ever created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities.
The ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging; they are the also the secret intention and dream of human longing.”
-John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes
