#surrogate.

Allen and her husband, Wardell Jasper, have since been granted full custody of their son Malachi.

towards the end, there weren’t many good days with claudia. there were times when john and stiles would come visit and she wouldn’t even know them. melissa can’t even imagine having a sickness that takes away those memories, that would keep her from knowing her own child.  but even so, melissa was never sure which was worse: the days she didn’t know or the days she did. at least on the days she didn’t recognize them, she didn’t know what she was missing.  the days leading up the claudia’s death were, without a doubt, the worst. and still, there was one moment that melissa will never, ever forget. a single moment of clarity as melissa was checking in on her; a quiet plea to just take care of her boys. to make sure stiles didn’t forget her, to make sure they both knew how much she loved them. and it’s one that melissa took seriously. she never brings claudia up on her own. she always waits for stiles to ask, but when he does, she tells him everything: that claudia loved him. that she never wanted to leave. that, above all else, she’d be so, so proud of the young man stiles has become.

in the early days, it was hard. at least when rafael was still around, even though it always felt like he’d checked out even before he actually did, he was still there. he was another body, someone who could run interference when things got too hard.  and rest assured: parenting? it’s hard.  it was worse in the beginning, when she was still trying to figure out how to run a household on one income, how to make it to the parent teacher conferences while having to work, how to make sure her kid got all his homework done. there were moments she was so sure she was going to break.  and then claudia died, leaving john in a similar sinking ship, only his was going down so much faster. both he and stiles were drowning and melissa realized that she didn’t have it quite so bad.  it takes a few months after losing claudia, a few months of coaxing, just trying to get john out of that head space, but when she does, she realizes that they kind of have their own little support group.  that they’re two single parents with kids, both so unsure of what they’re doing, so unsure that they’ll be able to manage to just get through into adulthood without screwing them up too badly.  they took turns babysitting, managing to get on opposite schedules at work so someone was always home. they swapped home cooked dinners, took turns picking the boys up for school and on nights when it was just too hard, they could be found commiserating at someone’s kitchen table over coffee while the kids played upstairs. in some ways, melissa was closer to john stilinski than she’d ever been to rafael. at some point, he’d turned into her best friend, her confidant, her partner in crime in this terrifying thing called parenting alone. and at some point around ninth grade, she realized that she wasn’t alone. that at some point over the last few years, they’d taken two halves of pathetically broken families and made one. their family? the mccall-stilinskis? that’s a family she wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. no matter how hard it was getting there.