She came into my life the day after my parents divorce finalized when I was just barely five years old, if that.
It is hard to remember such trivial details about childhood events before the age of nine, but only because my childhood was crammed full of major events ranging from traumatic to exuberant, depressive to satisfactory, and everything in between extraordinary and utterly pathetic. I digress.
This imp-like girl with big brown doe eyes and wildly feathered hair (as per 1980’s protocol) standing there with just two black garbage bags of worldly possessions, was barely eighteen years old, herself. My God! Only thirteen years older than I, she was! In a large family, she could have very well been my older sister.
She was introduced to my brother and me as our Aunt Lou, come to care for us children while our father worked, and now that mom was gone—since he had full custody. He was a police officer and his schedule was erratic at best, so it was important to have someone always available for the children—*aghmm*—for him. I’m sorry. Please, excuse me that.
It is hard for anyone to truly protect the innocence of youth, regardless of the value and quality of lies used to build the fortress around their purity. Especially when the lies do not cover up the whispering and laughing going on behind the child’s back. The kids at school overheard the gossip of their parents, which spread like wildfire in our very small, but suburban, middle-class town. As a naturally awkward introvert good at blending in with the shadows, I was able to pick up on what the subtle—but dirty—looks and blatant finger pointing was for.
Aunts do not share bedrooms with their brother-in-laws. Or the same bed. I came to realize the reality behind this farce my father had built to protect the minds of his young.
Without even missing a beat, my father and his wannabe Bunny began a fast-paced, party-hard lifestyle, picking up right where they were before the divorce went through. Only now they had the freedom to be a couple in the eyes of the law and amongst their peers and social circles.
Convenient timing, eh?
My mother had never been thin enough, blonde enough, risque enough, for my father and he made it clear having kids had only destroyed her chance of becoming the Playboy Barbie doll he wanted in a mate. Sexual playmate, but not reproductive—let’s not get that fact confused again.
Lo and behold, this new Aunt of mine was exactly the kind of playmate he had in mind. Plus, there was some crazy medical mishap just before they met rendering her unable to conceive children, thus eliminating any threat of ruining her perfect body.
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My new stepmom was really just my father’s own personal Playboy Bunny-recently graduated into the fresh open Playmate of The Century position and moved into his corner lot brick ranch suburban version of the Playboy mansion.
By day, Lou seemed like most other nannies or babysitters with two young children in her care. She fed us, bathed us, dressed us, and took us to school. She tried over time to step in and take over the role of mother completely. Only when the sun was up, though. I was merely a little girl, but I felt eerily threatened by her presence; leery and distrusting of her ostentatious displays of sexually charged behavior. This half-girl/half-woman creature wore her sensuality openly for all to see, in the same way that others wear their hearts on their sleeves.
By night, she shed her Newport News Catalog and Deb daywear for Merry-Go-Round, Victoria’s Secret Catalog, and Playboy Catalog night attire. She looked like a classy porno chick or a hillbilly Dream Angel, always ready to raise flags and shoot off rockets with a single sultry glare as she strutted by, hanging on my dad’s arm.
She was just like any other trophy girlfriend who came before her—this coveted piece of succulent raw meat belonged solely to him.
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By the time I was in middle school, I had been exposed to even more unabashed flaunting of sex appeal than a full season’s worth of Family Guy contains. It isn’t like they were educating me in all things perverse, but the scenes were set for stage and the example had already been cast. The images, thereof, ingrained into my subconscious. The lessons unknowingly being taught were taken to heart.
This was how women got men to fall in love with them, she blindly enacted for my modeling. This was what men wanted in a wife, he advertised without saying a word. This was what true love meant and this was how true love should be.
She was my mother now and, according to social structure, I was supposed to grow up to be just like her.
Subconsciously, my mind took it all in, shaping the girl inside me bit by bit as I grew up and matured. Her own childhood imagery coupled with her young naivety when she met my father seventeen years her senior, continued a cycle long repeated in her family. Now she was continuing it with someone else’s children.
As a child, all I saw was two selfish, self-centered, irresponsible, and neglectful adults who were only part-time parents. Now, as an adult, I look back and realize they were both functioning alcoholics with many other issues, like co-dependency. People often question how I look at my childhood as anything but great, because pictures show over-the-top Christmases and many family vacations, including an annual camping trip complete with river rafting and fireworks. We were in many extracurricular activities and never went without necessities, so it must have been a really good life.
What was missing from the family photo albums is Miss Playboy dressed to sell for a night at the bar. Every single night. They failed to show the random babysitters my father found while on patrol or from his party crowd. The albums don’t show my parents leaving us home alone after putting us to bed on nights there weren’t a sitter, trusting my dad’s brotherhood in blue to make regular patrols.
The family photo albums sure as hell forget to touch light on the fact that the bar came home at closing with them, at least four nights a week, cranking the basement stereo system so loud the furniture shook in my room and even with pillows over my head it sounded like I was at a rock concert, I would get my ass beat raw if I dared to come out of my room to complain.
Kids were supposed to sleep through anything, they claimed.
The photos also didn’t show Miss Playboy walking around in sexy lingerie no child should even know is made, giving everyone some of her attention as my dad watched on like a dirty old perv. And, they absolutely didn’t show us kids stepping over passed out people and removing beer cans from our path to get ready for school or my dad getting ready for work and acting as if we were imagining everything when we cried to him about being tired from the noise all night.
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By the time I was a young teen, I began trying to combat the party atmosphere by blaring my own heavy metal and grunge music (ahhhh, Kurt Cobain—I owe you mucho grande! You, too, Offspring and Metallica.), to drown out the blasphemous sounds emanating from my basement.
Most times I ended up earning an ass-beating by Aunt Lou, but it became so totally worth the pain. I resented everything she had brought into my life the day she moved in, not realizing that, in the naivety of youth, this had gone on for quite a long time before the divorce was ever considered.
The turbulence only intensified as I came into my own and began to really understand the adult world around me. I could never have friends over for fear they would be forced to sit there while I was berated and harassed into adult responsibilities Lou didn’t have time for with her “night life” or bear witness to her wannabe MILF aberrations.
I was long gone by the time I was sixteen but the impressions had left their mark.
My self-esteem damaged, my self-worth misunderstood, and my idea of love totally askew, it took me almost ten years to break the cycle, to undo all the misguided knowledge dropped into my lap unwanted and undeserving. I spent my late teens trying to emulate the sex appeal of The Bunny and finding false love in all the wrong places.
My early twenties were a drunken, stoned blur as I walked conspicuously in her footsteps.
The birth of my first child before my 22 birthday threw a tailspin in my repertory course, but I picked up where I left off before long. Somewhere in my late twenties, I found myself in a situation forcing some serious soul-searching on me. In my downfall, I was able to see clearly and realize I had become everything I had ever hated in this world: I had become my own fucked up version of HER. Until I let go of the judgment of her—until I took the time to see through her own eyes and understand her perspective—until I accepted that the reality of what was—was done and gone, there was no going back. I could never break the mold and set myself free.
And, today, I am free.
Free to be me.
Free to love and be loved from the inside out.
Free to express myself without boundary or using my sexuality.
Free of the sexual pretenses and pressures which clouded my judgment and governed my behaviors for way too long. It has been one helluvah ride to get to where I am at, but I cannot say, even as twisted and unhealthy as it was, that I didn’t have fun emulating my Aunt Lou while it lasted.
I am ever the wiser for it, too.
In fact, if there was one thing growing up with Playmate Of The Century for a stepmother taught me in the end, it was how to be a good mother to my own children, how to raise my daughters to respect themselves, respect their bodies, love who they are, and distinguish between love and lust with ease. I have the tools to strengthen them against the pressures of a sexist society and show them how to be confident and self-assured in their own skin without flaunting a thing.
All that I went through showed me how to do better by my family and be the involved, always present mother, both by day and night, which I am now.
It feels so good to know I am the mother I always wanted for myself.
And I kinda owe it all to that Playboy Bunny who was my stepmom.
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Photo: Melissa Adret (Model)/Flickr
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