My name is Samantha. I was always a chubby little girl. My mom assured me that as I got bigger, things would slim down. Then, about the time I hit puberty, I began to realize that my metabolism and appetite for good food were such that I was destined to be overweight. My older sister is slim. My mom was slim until an accident forced her into a wheelchair for a year. Since then she and I have looked more like mother and daughter than she and Linda.
The things that go with being fat -- cruel remarks from kids (especially the girls, but boys, too), low self esteem, etc. Didn't make it easier to try to lose weight. I knew by the time I was sixteen that all I could do was hope to firm up my oversize body. I hated exercise, but I kept at it. For a while.
When I was seventeen, two things happened that would change my life a great deal. First, my mom divorced my dad and married this guy who lived in a little town about a hundred miles from Seattle. My sister was almost twenty one and had been living with her boyfriend in our family home for three years by then. I didn't want to leave Indiana, where I had grown up. So Mom let me stay with Dad. She called almost every day and sent money for support, even though she had custody.
My dad can best be described as a loser. That's being kind. He was never very good to my mom. It wasn't like he beat her or anything, but he's lazy. Truth be told, she had done all the work to support us all of their life together. Even though I was living with him, he didn't really care what I did. He'd grown up as a hippy, and stayed true to those ideas of "freedom". So, he stayed "free" of work as much as he could. That meant we ate a lot of ramen noodles, since Mom couldn't send a lot each month.
The second thing that happened was when I finally took the plunge and rid myself of my virginity. The first time wasn't bad. When the asshole came around a couple of days later and said he wanted to fuck me again I turned him down. He wasn't happy. He took what I'd given him freely before. Technically it was rape, but once he had me down I relaxed and let him do it. I figured it would just be easier. His mother was on the school board. My mom said she would support me if I wanted to bring charges. To me, it was too much trouble. So it was "Goodbye Terre Haute, hello Seattle." She flew back and drove me up there with her. She had to retrieve her car anyway, since my dad was running it into the ground.
All the way across the country, I swore to my mom that I'd never like this guy who -- in my view -- had taken her from our family. She was so happy, though. It made me wonder. She'd never seemed happy for as long as I could remember. Now she seemed 'lighter', or something. She kept telling me how fantastic this Bob guy was. How much they loved each other. I put on my headset and listened to my music. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.
We drove up in front of the house they had rented while he was building a new house just outside of town. Bob came out to help unload all the shit I'd insisted I couldn't live without. He shook my hand and smiled at me. I did all I could do to seem friendly. I decided he was okay looking, for an old man. Still I didn't want to like him. The fact that I was going to have to live in the same house with him and my mom finally hit home, though. I felt shaky inside as I carried boxes and suitcases inside.
One of the things we brought with us was a new 'assemble-it-yourself' unit to hold my computer and stereo. Bob wasted no time bringing out screwdrivers and wrenches and helped me to put it together. I watched him when he didn't know it. He seemed like a nice guy. He didn't try to make friends with me, he just worked away and asked me to hand him parts of the shelving. If he'd have started prying, I would have clammed up. As it was, I felt like it was me who had to ask questions and say things.
Before I realized it, we were having a conversation. He was treating me as an adult, not like his wife's kid. Finally, I looked at him and told him how weird it was to have a 'stepfather'. He laughed and said, "It's no weirder for you than it is for me, Honey." That was it. From then on we got to be closer and closer. He never intruded on what I considered my space. He never tried to tell me what to do unless I asked. And he made my mom happy.
The kids in school weren't very friendly to me. Bob had a daughter my age (but a year ahead of me in school) and she was a little bitch. Even Bob admitted that. He blamed that on her mother -- who still lived there, too. He said she had raised Ashley to be her little princess, and that was exactly how the bitch acted. I found out after a couple of months that she had told the other girls that if they were friendly to me, she would make their lives hell. I didn't tell Bob or Mom. I didn't want to start trouble with Bob and his daughter.
Skip ahead a year. I was eighteen that year. Mom, Bob and I had become a family. From that geographic and temporal distance, I could see what an asshole my dad had been (and still was). Mom didn't say it. Bob didn't say it -- in fact, he never has said anything derogatory about Dad. But now that I was living in a house where two people truly loved each other, where they helped each other -- not just one of them working while the other one loafed, where there was easy laughter, instead of that which comes at another's expense, I actually saw. I learned what it was like to be in a happy family.
Bob was older than Mom. He had, just the year before, been placed on disability due to a back problem. He had become a house-husband. He did all the cooking and most of the cleaning and stuff around the house. Mom worked as a director of a local business. I went to school and did the dishes at night.
Then things changed. The people Mom worked for took advantage of her. They wouldn't let her do her job, so she quit. Unfortunately, the town was so small, there really wasn't anything else for her to do there. At least nothing that would let her use her skills and degree. She finally convinced Bob that she had to take a job in Seattle that paid well. It was too far to commute, so she had to move there and come home on weekends. I wasn't bothered. I really liked -- okay, loved -- Bob for what he had done for my mom and for me. It had been his idea to bring me out to live with them. Mom said he had suggested it when they first got married, but Mom didn't want to uproot me. In fact, I liked being around Bob better than I liked being with Mom.