Kamala Harris Would Have Been The Dream Stepmom For My Kids
Imagine how much better single motherhood would have been with Momala in your corner?
What I wouldn’t have given to have Kamala Harris as my kids’ stepmom, my own partner in raising my four boys when I was a single mom. What a difference it would have made in my life if my ex-husband had married someone like her, and we’d all had a Momala of our very own.
I was on my own with my boys when they were oh-so-very little, just 2, 3, 7, and 9 years old. My ex-husband met a new woman and yes, it was sad and difficult and weird in the beginning. I might even go out on a limb to say it always feels sad and difficult and weird when one version of your family ends and another begins. I couldn’t watch the movie Stepmom without sinking into a deep depression. What if I died? What if she became their mom? What if she knew all the words to their favorite songs and I just knew the words to mine? It scared me a lot, at first.
But then I started to think about how things might get a little easier if we could somehow sort of band together, me and her. Maybe she would really love my kids and they would love her. Maybe she could become a sort of friend? (That was one of the things I missed most after my divorce: Talking to someone who thought my kids were brave and sweet and funny.) It was still so complicated with their dad, but maybe it wouldn’t be complicated with her.
Suffice it to say that never happened for us. But it seems like it did for Kamala Harris, who is a stepmom to Ella and Cole and who wrote in a 2019 essay for Elle that, “To know Cole and Ella is to know that their mother, Kerstin, is an incredible mother. Kerstin and I hit it off ourselves and are dear friends. She and I became a duo of cheerleaders in the bleachers at Ella’s swim meets and basketball games, often to Ella’s embarrassment. We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost too functional.”
I think of my years in the bleachers watching my sons play football. Chatting with other parents who were watching their own children while I was the only one watching mine. What would I have given to have a Momala by my side? Someone who was watching my kids too, who was cheering for them with me? Someone I could have gone to when I was so deeply worried about all the things you worry about when you have kids, and instead of that “Oh I know, my kids are like that too” response I got from my mom friends, maybe my own Momala would have been there with me, thinking only of the boys we both loved together.
They might have needed a Momala as a confidante, too. I think my kids never saw me as anything but a mom, but a Momala — someone who felt like part of their world but also of the world in a different way — would have been so good for them.
For me too, I think. I would have invited her to dinner sometimes when it could just be the two of us. I would have bought her Christmas presents and I sort of think she would have bought them for me too. We could have texted back and forth about the boys’ birthday parties and soccer games and friends and snack preferences and maybe she wouldn’t have thought it was so boring to hear about my kids. Because it does get boring for people who don’t love them.
I think my own Momala might have wanted to hear it. She might have even had stories of her own from those long weekends of silence I sat through while my kids were away from me. I wondered all the time how they were sleeping, if they were putting on their sunscreen, if they were eating their breakfast and getting hugs. Silly things I couldn’t ask my ex-husband about because of our history and the implied accusation he might have heard behind my words.
A Momala could have told me, though. She would have understood that my weekends without the kids sometimes felt like barren wastelands of uselessness. She might have told me about a new trick one son did on his skateboard or another son’s bruised elbow. She might have told me I was doing a good job when there was no one to tell me I was doing a good job at the only thing that mattered to me then. Being their mom.
Maybe if my boys had a Momala would have kept me from feeling so damn alone in everything.
Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She joined the BDG team in 2016 as a news and entertainment writer. Jen has written essays on raising four sons as a single mom, on travel, and on losing her son at Walmart, and her bylines have appeared in Good Housekeeping, O Magazine, Parents, Refinery29, Insider, and more. Her book NEST, about raising her sons and learning to live alone in Europe was released in May 2021.
