Summer Love: Jack, Bella and Harry
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In our Summer Love series, Ginger Gorman explores different kinds of heart-warming Canberra relationships.
In the fairytales, the mother dies and the father remarries the wicked stepmother. She’s mean and vindictive and proceeds to ruin the kids’ lives.
But what if, in real life, the stepmother isn’t wicked? What if, she brings love, joy and a baby sibling that you adore? (Yep. She just might be the fairy godmother instead!)
Six years ago, when Kate was 31, she moved to Canberra to be with the love of her life, Mark. This isn’t an article about that love story, though. It’s about what happened next.
Mark had joint custody—week-on week-off—of his two children from a previous marriage, Jack and Bella. Unlike many step-parents to-be, Kate had no reservations.
In the year prior to moving to Canberra from Perth, she’d been travelling back and forward and had met the kids many times.
Thinking back, she says: “I was young enough to be totally naïve about suddenly becoming a parent… I think I had rose-coloured glasses on and I was also a bit head over heels in love with Mark. So, I thought, ‘I can definitely do this.’”
Bella, now 15, remembers meeting Kate six years ago and says she adored her straight away: “I immediately just felt super attached. And I was like, it was a new parent! Nice. I thought she was the cool step mum.”
Likewise, Bella’s older brother, Jack, 17, says he quickly became close to his new step mum: “Kate says that I might have been a bit standoffish, but I don’t remember that at all. I remember being very similar to Bella.”
At this point, the three are laughing, and Kate then clarifies: “He [Jack] was just way more cautious. He was like, “I’m sussing you out and I’m going to let you know that I’m sussing you out.”
“They used to say to me when we talked to them about whether or not I should move to Canberra, ‘Well, we don’t want our dad to be lonely anymore.’”
Jack picks up the thread of the story and says: “When Kate was coming to visit from Perth, our dad would always be in a very good mood and would be a lot chirpier and a lot happier. And then he would be a lot quieter after she would leave, and just a little more gloomy.
“So, we could definitely see…that he really liked Kate and he felt a lot better when she was around.”
I’m amazed that neither Jack nor Bella had any resistance to Kate moving into their home. But Jack explains it like this: “Me and Bella are very affectionate people. We like having people we can get attention from and we can talk to and things like that…it was not very hard [adjusting to Kate].”
The star of this story, though, is three-and-a-half-year-old blonde bombshell Harry, who briefly joins the zoom call but quickly gets grumpy, and goes to watch a cartoon in another room.
However, when asked, Harry does say that he loves his older siblings “…because they are my family.” And he knows in his heart that Jack and Bella love him right back too. His favourite activities with them are sleepovers and Super Mario Kart.
Jack jokingly—but also seriously – tells me this is the “real” love story here.
When Kate and Mark sat Jack and Bella down to tell them Kate was pregnant in 2016, both kids were over the moon. Bella “immediately just screamed, ‘Yes!’ at the top of my lungs and I couldn’t sleep for the entire night because I was so excited.”
The night Harry was born in February 2017 is crystal clear in Jack’s mind: “I remember it was really late at night and then Dad and Kate came into my room and woke me and they were like, ‘We’re going to the hospital to have a baby now.’ And I immediately got out of bed and I was like, ‘I’m ready.’
“I was so excited to meet him. And then I got to see him, and he was very, very sleepy and me and Bella got to hold him. I’ve still got these photos of him in my arms and Bella’s arms,” Jack says proudly.
Bella also recalls that she “immediately fell in love” with her baby brother.
“He was so cute. And he still is,” she adds, “I just really love having just the two brothers and just having fun every time we come around. It’s like being the cool siblings.”
In response to Bella’s reflections, Kate jokingly describes Harry as “the family therapy dog” because he somehow manages to heal all ructions.
“When you have two teenagers and a toddler in the house, there’s a lot of emotions. It can be quite heightened. There’s a lot of hormones flying around. But you will often find the three of them just hanging out together. Sometimes Harry just needs a cuddle and love and that consumes and refocuses everyone.”
Jack chimes in: “You can tell he loves us very dearly. We love doing lots of things with him. We take him to the zoo or the dinosaur museum or we’ll go to the film museum and spin around and play with him.
“There’s been plenty of times where I’ve been having a bad day or something or a bad week and then Harry will come up and sit next to me and I’ll play with him or something and just like being in his presence just makes me happy. I just look at him sometimes and it’s an overwhelming amount of love I have for him.”
Feature image: All Grown Up Weddings
