The Boogeyman.

There’s a boogeyman in every family. A generationally-curated conglomeration of cultural lore, built upon the back of a specific local legend, that incorporates the nature of fear you need to inculcate in your children, and adds to that a splash of absurdism, a little bit of a reality, a dash of creative individualisation in the form of exaggerated personal experiences and an adult conspiracy to continue to build and, at least, pretend to believe in the story forever.

We grew up with tales of a possessed society of cheetahs who went mad every monsoon and ate all the people who went into the forest, especially at night. When I tell you I spent my childhood convinced I would be trying to solve for vicious Indian leopards my entire life, you better believe it. I was fucking stressed. As I got a bit older, I started to get it, there really were wild animals in the forests around us, they came to our houses and sometimes killed our dogs, but the monsoon is the most dangerous time to be in the forest, so it made sense that the cheetahs became possessed in that period. I get it, our families were just trying to teach us to be safe from the wilderness, but all the logic in the world doesn’t dissipate the power of the lore. The most amazing thing about the boogeyman is that, in time, even if the story continues to fall apart, it leaves behind a lesson, a little fear and the kind of whimsy that makes you want to choose to believe in something you know isn’t real.

But then, you grow up, and cheetahs turn to monsters in human skin.

For the past decade or so, I’ve had a boogeyman. You’d think it would be the man who first raped me or the man who spent years abusing me but that’s not it. My boogeyman is the ex-wife of my spouse, the biological mother of my stepson and a constant presence in my life that I hadn’t confronted for years. I was told not to, not by the mystical characters that warn you about the dangers of the forests, but the people who hold real-power in the real world, lawyers and lovers. I watched my partner go through the most vicious divorce, and through it, it was vital she never find out about me so she became the reason I had to be functionally invisible in his life for a while. We could have a home together but his people couldn’t know of my existence. He promised me, as did the lawyers, that once they were divorced, she wouldn’t be a function of his life anymore and I would never have to worry again, not about the public allegations she levelled on him, not about the slander relating to his sexuality and not about the need to look over my shoulder at all times.

At first, I didn’t really believe how serious this was, I thought it was the way of lawyers, you know? They have to focus on evidence and possibilities so their advice is the same for everyone. I didn’t believe it until spies and private-investigators were sent into our home, not until our lives were being mined for leverage to extract more money, but once I realised it was real, I truly did get scared. I don’t fear having to take a public stand for anything I do, but I feared losing him and I feared that this fight would destroy him, both emotionally and financially. We got through it and it ended with him successfully disproving her allegations, securing the divorce and most importantly, gaining permanent custody of his son. I was thrilled for him, and us, but I also knew, us having custody meant she would always be a presence. He would visit her in his holidays and she would speak to him over the phone, she would be in our house in a sense. They told me it wouldn’t be like that, that a person who would give up their child for more money wasn’t going to stick around for the child, but I didn’t believe them. I knew when I made the decision to co-parent with him and eventually marry him, I was not just adding a child to my life forever, I was adding his mother too.

Look, it’s not that I don’t trust what I hear about her. I have seen a lot of it. However, when people who were once married or in love end relationships in this manner, they tend to let their emotions dictate both behaviour and reason, and maybe that’s okay, losing your life and child is a matter of the heart so perhaps, it is important that the heart have a say, but the heart lies a lot, it perceives differently, and it often believes its lies to be the truth. I also know that my partner was not the best partner in that marriage, neither of them were—they both cheated, she was violent and manipulative, he was dutiful but cold—none of them were doing their best but he learned a lot from that and changed, I could not actually discount the possibility that she would as well. I really wanted to talk to her right then and I really, really thought, she would as well. After all, she was sending her child to live with me, wouldn’t you want to know everything about that person? Wouldn’t you want some kind of reassurance your kid would be well?

I was thinking about things like that but everyone around me, including her, were thinking about lawyers, loans, alimony, custodial agreements and treading with caution. I suppose, I get it, when you’ve lost so much to the cause of freedom, you don’t want to screw it up at the last moment and my naïve desire to talk to the mom was a screw up. I stood down and let them reassure me she wouldn’t be a presence in my life. I let them tell me endless tales of her manipulation and intentions, show me evidence of her fraudulent nature and let them convince me that she was the mother if she cared about her child, she would want to talk to me but she did no such thing. It drove me mad, I couldn’t explain it. Many years later, she finally admitted she had given up her custodial rights as a form of revenge, she thought I would leave her ex-spouse as soon as I realised it meant parenting a child and paying off the exorbitant alimony-loans he secured to gain custody, he wouldn’t be able to handle raising a child on his own, he would give custody back to her and she’d be able to get even more money from him. I don’t know what to do with that information at all but I do know it explains why she didn’t even care to want to make contact.

Obviously, her plan crashed and burned, but so did his. She thought I would leave, he thought she would leave but what really happened, what I knew would happen, is that our child is being raised by three-parents. I don’t actually have a heart-warming story of redemption to offer for this eventuality, it is genuinely complicated to parent in this configuration, when adversarial relationships exist but duties and rights are dictated by an actionable piece of paper. When the arbitrary decrees of judges pretend they can adjudicate the minutiae of love. She became a part of my life, but the rules and the lawyers never left, so for almost seven-years now, she has been my boogeyman. I have never met her and until recently, I had never spoken to her either. The lore continued but now I had a secondary form of access. The child told me of his relationship and experiences with his mother, I hear her speak on the phone to him, I know so much about her but despite the fact that her son thinks of me as a parent and spends eighty percent of the year living with me (and his dad), we have no virtually no communication.

We have a lot of impressions.

I know I have spent a lot of time parenting to undo the damage of a narcissistic, vengeful parent from my child. I hate saying that, because I feel like that is what people expect me as the step-parent to say, they expect me to buy into the narrative and hate the birth-giver so I feel better about taking her child away from her. That’s the social-script on this situation. I know there have been moments when she was complaining about the kid’s behaviour and my spouse, preconditioned as he is to see her as the monster, explained it away using that, but the right decision, in that situation, would have been to listen and address it with the kid because they were things that children do that parents need to deal with. I know that she suffered an emotional crisis after her second marriage ended and her son began to have the same adversarial relationship with her as she did with my spouse, I know she tried but couldn’t suppress her fundamental need to control the child instead of listening to him.

I know that dealing with the reality of me has been a long and difficult road for her. In the beginning, she encouraged the kid to hate me, she was proactive about making sure I was continually reminded that I wasn’t the real mother. When the kid started to like me, she got more aggressive about it. For a couple of years, he couldn’t even take my name without her getting mad at him about liking me more than he liked her. As time passed, she started to acknowledge me as part of the parental unit, her anger shifted back to my spouse and every once in a while, she would have a softer moment. She sent me chips when she heard me desiring what the kid was eating over the phone. She also decided there were certain things that reinstated her rights in her eyes, all things that have to do with signing documents or being part of listed guardians, things about which I care very little. I think it made her feel more secure to not have to fight me, because I don’t care to fight, I don’t need a title, I just love that I get to parent this kid, and in some ways, the configuration in which I have to do it is the greatest gift I have ever received.

This kid is not legally bound to me, if he wants to get rid of me as a parent, it is so easy to do. Legally, I am disposable. Biologically, I have no claim. I can and will adopt him when he turns eighteen, if he wants to be adopted by me, but until then, I have no functional rights. My access is purely dependent on my marriage and our desire to have access to each other. That means, to me, this is the ultimate exercise in non-possessive love, and I am not afraid of that. We are not bound by roles, duty or law to one another, and socially-speaking, it is way more conceivable to people that step-parents/children have issues instead of love, whatever relationship we have, in every moment, is purely a function of wanting it. It is liberating to parent within a construct where the child is not bound to you, and you cannot count on blood or duty to keep them, you have to show up and be yourself for them every single day. It sounds scary but it is freeing as fuck. I don’t fear losing our love but I do fear losing my access and that is why she has been the boogeyman.

I know that legally my fear is a bit blown out of proportion, the child is not a child anymore and has absolutely no desire to go live with his mom. I know that, but she’s the boogeyman, and I know she is capable of malice and retribution so I run scared. I hide myself because that is advisable. I stay away from the forest in the monsoon because I don’t want to be eaten by a possessed cheetah. I tell the kid not to present too glowing a picture of our relationship to his mom lest she be angered and act out. I never show my face or let my voice be heard, I don’t go to places where she might be because I don’t want to be the instigator of a situation that upends everyone’s peace. Or, at least, I didn’t, until recently.

Time is a cruel thing if you feel like you wasted it, but a magnificent thing if you use it well. It brings you a tremendous amount of confidence and perspective. I have been a parent for almost seven-years now. He has gone from a little munchkin I could fling over my shoulder like a sack of rice to a teenager who is a bit too smug about being taller than me and is constantly trying to steal my nice shoes. I don’t have any more rights than I did at the start of this, but I have a lot more comfort and confidence in our relationship. Enough to help me overcome my fear.

A few months ago, he called his father while on summer vacation and in the middle of a fight with his mom. She was there, the kid was there and on the other end, my partner, trying to comprehend the situation. The kid was crying, she was shouting and my spouse was looking up flights and lawyers in one second. Usually, I would wait until she left to talk to kid and give him whatever he needs, but something ravenous arose to address what was important, not evidence that she is a bad mother, not proof that he would do the right thing and record it, but perspective that the child needed to be heard and helped. I took the phone and let her see me. I addressed the kid and he started talking, instantly, he explained what happened, how he felt and what he wanted. They all calmed down and talked to each other like people for the first time. They addressed actual issues instead of constraints for the first time. She thanked me for helping.

Of course, that wasn’t a magical moment of transformation for anyone. The adversarial relationships continue, improvement is incremental and fundamental natures do not change but for me that was magical. I confronted the boogeyman and defused it, I no longer feel scared of it. I know that I shouldn’t go to the forest when it rains because it is dangerous, but I also know there are things that are worth the danger. A lawyer cannot tell me that, they wouldn’t get it, sometimes you cannot think about what looks good on paper, because you have to do what love tells you do in order to be there for someone. It is worth the danger to claim my space as a parent not because I deserve it but because it is not the law, not the role, not the blood and not the duty of it that makes me a parent, it’s the child needing and wanting me to be that. That matters more than the rest of it and sometimes that means looking past the lore and into the face of your fear. I’ve seen it now. The boogeyman is dead.