Wednesday Martin

I can’t even remember his name. It’s true that I’m not much of a sports fan, but he seems like the least important player in the game I care about. It’s the women–one married to him, the other the mother of his child–that have me (and perhaps you) interested.

Being a mother skews your vision, heightening and hindering it in all kinds of ways that take you by surprise. So does being a stepmother. My pregnancy progressed along with Bridget Moynahan’s. Her son is a month older than mine–though, it goes without saying, she (a leggy giantess, sort-of-famous for something vaguely Hollywood-related) looked a hell of a lot better than I (a mere mortal who at 5′3 resembles a chickpea while pregnant) did during the whole thing. As her personal drama unfolded, however, it wasn’t just our baby bumps I was comparing. She was tabloid fodder, after all, and so I had practically unfettered access to every development, real and imagined, in the unfolding drama of her personal and interpersonal woes.

How horrible, I would think to myself that sweltering summer, my swollen ankles propped up as I read Us and contemplated what to name my own baby, to be dealing with morning sickness AND a love triangle. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll summarize: Bridget and Tom Brady (right, that’s it) were a couple. Then they broke up. After an interval (or perhaps, some tabloids suggest, before there was any interval to speak of), Tom took up with Gisele Bundchen. Could there be a more formidable romantic rival than the world’s most famous push-up bra and thong model? God is cruel. It didn’t look good for Bridget until, at some point in this timeline, she discovered she was pregnant. And held a press conference about it. For a while, it seemed that Tom and Bridget might reconcile (I cannot have been the only one rooting for this outcome, and am guessing Bridget had the same hopes). Then came rumors that Gisele was pregnant. Quickly dispelled, it seemed, by reported sightings of her downing vodka tonics.

Poor Bridget, I would tsk tsk to myself and I looked at photos of her working out at the gym in her last trimester, or caught a sound byte about her solitary progress toward her due date on ‘E.’  She looked fantastic at her baby shower, but was she lonely? Photos of her on the streets of New York during the latter days of her pregnancy sometimes seemed to catch her looking wistful (and disconcertingly un-pregnant, like someone who had just had a hamburger), which would get me projecting and sympathizing all over again.

How could she possibly handle it? I wondered, fueled by hormones and outrage. Of course I didn’t know the first thing about this woman, and still don’t–maybe she’s a horrible narcissist who pulled the whole stunt for attention? maybe she did it just to drive a wedge between her ex and his supermodel girlfriend?–but it was hard for me (and many of us) to see her as anything other than the wronged party here.  When it came to the birth itself, however, I started to see Bridget as a full-on masochist. Or was she a sadist? Tabloids ran stories for weeks about whether Tom would be at the birth, whether Gisele was upset about that prospect, whether the actual event would bring Tom and Bridget together again. And then came the stories, after the birth of the baby, that Bridget was hurt that Tom hadn’t stuck around for long after the delivery to get to know the baby, opting instead to jet back off to Gisele.

There had been a constant hum about how Bridget wanted Tom involved in the baby’s life, to be an active and involved father. Why would anyone want that when the world is full of perfectly good father figures who haven’t refused to reconcile after impregnating and then breaking up with you? We’ll never know. But Bridget’s desire to have daddy in the picture meant that eventually, something else also came into focus: the inevitable photos of Gisele, radiant, cradling baby John in her arms as if he were her own. Gisele and Tom in the park with John, looking relaxed and happy and comfortable with a stroller between them. Tom  and Gisele walking to the car, with John propped on her hip, looking cozy and secure.

And then most recently, Tom and Giselle walking out of a Santa Monica church after being married, with John, now eighteen months old, once again in Gisele’s arms. “The pair spent their first night as newlyweds with John!” Us trumpeted, and there was speculation that the two married in the quickie-California ceremony because they feared Bridget would not let the baby travel to Brazil with them (so unreasonable!)

As someone who has studied families for the last three years, focusing on breakups and re-partnerings with children, my professional response has been keen interest in how all this is going to play out, and whether we might learn anything from it. And then there’s my response as a mother: I want to rip Gisele’s hair out. Gisele’s camp says she loves the kid like he’s her own. Bridget’s people say Gisele cuddles baby opportunistically, whenever the cameras are around, to spite her guy’s ex, in the same way she chose to get married in his ex’s church. Does Gisele, I find myself wondering, as if personally aggrieved, have to rub it in the way she does?

For the nine years I’ve been a woman  with stepchildren and the three years I’ve spent writing my book, I have seen the world through the eyes of a woman who partners with a man who has kids from a previous relationship. For a lot of reasons, it’s not easy being a stepmother or stepmother-figure, and the hostility of ex-wives was something women with stepkids told me about in almost every interview I conducted. Given my personal and professional experience, it’s been easy for me to understand how much it hurts to be set up for failure by a woman who wants to keep you at arm’s length from her children. And to think that woman is simply nuts. “Just stay away,” our husbands’ exes seem to say, and frequently actually do. What stepmothers most often wonder is, Why? “He was divorced for ten years before I even went on a date with him,” one woman told me, shaking her head, “but from the way his ex treats me, you’d think I’d broken up a perfectly happy marriage and destroyed the world’s most ideal family.”

What this particular celebrity drama has made real and remarkably visceral for me, for the first time, is the very primitive vulnerability and fear–and this is separate from sexual jealousy, which we commonly assume is motivating an ex-wife–that a mother must feel when her ex re-partners. Forget about what made her decide to go through with the pregnancy, whether her motivations were pathological or underhanded. Forget about why anyone would want to have the baby’s father involved if it meant being part of a triangle.  The idea of going half-sies with one’s child is profoundly disturbing when that child is a baby. And apparently, from the way our partners’ exes act, when that child is no longer a baby as well.

When I think of my seventeen-month-old and what it would be like to have to hand him over to my husband (in this scenario, my ex) and his new, bionic, uber-babe of an underwear-model girlfriend, I feel off-kilter and sick. When I entertain the hypothetical scenario of needing to pump milk for the six-month old he was so he could spend the weekend with daddy and Her, away from me, I want to issue a primal scream.

So I’m going to write a thank you note to Gisele, for helping me finally, truly understand one of the most important aspects of my research, something that was heretofore a mere abstraction for me. And then I’m going to tear her hair out.

Tags: bridget moynahan, gisele bundchen, re-partnering with children, stepmonster, wednesday martin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under book news, celebs/popular culture, misc, personal, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.