Stepmother

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . on Being Good

I wonder if the remarried woman has more pressure on her to be a good wife than in a first marriage. I wonder if the stakes feel higher to be good because the odds of a remarriage succeeding are so dismal.

And how good does a good wife have to be? How good does a stepmother-wife have to be?

Does going from good wife to divorced woman have something to do with how mothers reach for their children? Is there something about reclaiming and emboldening the image of good mother that will somehow compensate for the loss of good wife? And if good mothers and good wives are good women, can there be two good women in an extended stepfamily? 

Is there a limited amount of good?

Is the label good necessary, is it automatic?

test-clip-art-7iakpmratI can argue no one needs it. Good feels like a set up for doing too much, for over-doing, and for over-extending. Good feels like a great way to start a competition.

Think of it. Someone needs to find that misplaced coat because the weather turned cold overnight and it’s raining outside. The child can’t walk to school in the cold without a coat. So someone must find the coat. Who jumps to go find the coat? 

And I wonder, is there more pressure to be the good stepmother from the children, more from the husband, or more from the ex-wife? Or are we trying so hard to prove we are worthy of this man because others lay claim to him as father, son, or ex-husband that we impose the good label on ourselves.

Do we feel we have to prove we are good enough to justify him marrying us in the first place? To justify him wanting his children to get along with us? To justify him trusting us enough to leave the children with us?

And so we bend, mold, flex, double-over, curl up, make ourselves smaller, make ourselves stronger, do more, be more, try to be prettier, try to solve all problems. We aspire to become female Macgyvers, able to do anything, be anywhere, and love anyone.

How do we decide who establishes the measure of a good stepmother? Who do we let apply this measure to us?

And finally, how is our good earned?

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . Marries With Eyes Wide Open 

You knew what you were getting in for. You knew his ex was obsessed with controlling his house. You knew she felt bad for not caring for the kids and leaving them with you, enough that she made a scene to distract from the truth. You knew she had taken him to court once before. 

You also knew only the younger two kids were crazy about you. The older ones were standoffish and silent. 

Most of all, you knew you were crazy about this man who held your hand and said “I do” while he smiled into your eyes. 

To assume your innocence is to disempower you. To assume you were completely blinded is to discredit your intellect. You knew remarriage with children was going to be tough. 

You didn’t know how tough. 

You didn’t realize how strongly the mythology and cultural hatred of stepmothers would seep into your home and cover every surface with its sticky and cloying clutches. You didn’t know you’d never be able to move within your life without certain assumptions being made about you. 

You didn’t know no one would get to know you before they spread rumors about your opinions and behaviors. You didn’t know you needed a press agent. 


Most of all, you didn’t know marrying a man with children would be like a crash course on politics and mediation. You could not know how deeply your personal self would be negated nor the degree to which you didn’t matter. 

You couldn’t know until you knew. And it would take you some months, if not years to awaken to the knowing and understanding. 

You’d arise one day and go about your business and realize the extent of your patience. You’d find it in you to one more time to step away from confrontation and the possibility of leaving altogether.

You’d find out how much confidence you had in yourself when no one else showed any in you. You’d find out how tolerant you were and how able to stand in a strange culture without feeling invisible. 

You’d find out that you didn’t have to prove anything and that your stepchild thinking he or she made decisions was not the same as that child actually making them. You’d find out your willingness to make space for someone else and the difference between that and disappearing. 

If you are marrying or already married to a man with children, the gift available to you is to work with yourself and enter into your most spiritual existence, ever. To stay still, inside your own pain and suffering until the core of it shifts and you can see another way to live within it and not be it. Know you will find a way that works for you and not just for everyone else. 

This gift of seeing and being self, of respecting self, which I so highly recommend you take, has the potential to be liberating in a way nothing has liberated you before. 

If your energy goes into this process of growing awareness of who you are and what you bring to life, including this marriage, then you can benefit from the richness and live many happy years with this husband of yours with all the skills you’ll need to do anything. And I do mean anything. 

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . Gets Up Each Morning

Some days I wonder how we survive. Not to be melodramatic, but this business of getting up and getting kids off to school and greeting them when they come home and feeding them and educating them and getting them to the place of being able to go out into the world on their own in this day and age, this is emotionally challenging at best.

When this scenario plays out in a stepfamily, it’s nothing short of a miracle.

I wonder how fathers go to bed at night without an aching heart, I wonder how they hold an arm around the one who isn’t the mother of the children, seeing her pain and feeling her pain.

I can guess many a father would like to escape memories of the argument with the children’s mother. I know many a father who pushes those emotions down day after day to deal with Little League and driving lessons. I know many a father who is there, who shows up no matter what the children need.

I’ve heard from women who marry men with children with full knowledge remarriage is difficult at best. These same prepared, successful women are then knocked to their knees by the tidal wave of unbelonging. The wave is so high and so powerful, few stepmothers escape it regardless of background and family history. It’s a wonder more don’t run, it’s a wonder so many stay. Many a stepmother’s courage should be the subject of legend. 

Maybe you’re like me and you’ve spent many hours considering what it takes to be in this remarriage stewpot? You’ve wondered just what could be done to improve the situation because you intuitively know if the situation were better for fathers and stepmothers the situation would be better for the children and likely even the children’s mother. You’ve marveled at the strength of those who only have one strategy, the strategy of pushing out and pushing away.

Those stepmothers who stay in their remarriages have found a way to keep living in their skin, a way to stay rooted to their own experience and not be sucked into another person’s view of them. They have developed an ability to let things bounce off and fall away. They stay deeply connected to their resilience, that ability to not be sunk by any one event or even a whole bunch of events. They know how to stay afloat.

Ask a stepmother what she’s doing. Keeping the faith, or trying to do so. Focusing on her relationship with her partner/husband, or intending to do so. Feeling like a good person but not so much she feels like a slave, or hoping to do so. Because several things are true, she is not the mother. She is not responsible to replace the mother especially since the mother is likely alive and well. Even if she is the custodial stepmother, the marriage will be more successful if she isn’t automatically conscripted for a certain role in the child’s life. She should discuss this in-depth with her beloved and ease her way in rather than get sucked underwater. She knows that and sometimes she lets it slide when they don’t get around to the conversation. She might regret it later and even blame him for not taking the initiative.

She gets up and tries her best. Sometimes her best is too much and she can’t know that until it’s too late. Sometimes she gives and gives and leaves herself open. Sometimes she goes out on that limb and ends up falling or being pushed off.

Often she regrets giving too much.

Often she is exhausted. Often she can see her husband is exhausted.

Some days she wonders how she survives.

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . knows when she’s done.

Adapted from a post February 22, 2012

There comes a moment after you’ve been struggling with a person for a long time, often years, when you know you are simply done. Maybe you reach done because the internal storm can only keep it’s energy for so long. Maybe the done moment occurs because you get bored and interested in other things. Or, maybe you become done with the difficult person because you realize that you’ll never connect in the way you’d really like to connect and you’re wasting your breath.

Before we get to the point we admit to being done, we can often come close to erasing ourselves. It’s as if we get caught up in clutching and trying and we can’t let go even if we wanted. While it’s our human spirit to keep trying and keep hoping that things will be different tomorrow, tomorrow never comes and we wake up worn out and exhausted.

Let’s take my dad and I. One day, a conversation with him started the same way it often did, with the same dance . . . he made a comment in a certain tone. I shrugged my shoulders with a certain eye roll. Then, he huffed back with a snotty remark. But, that time rather than protest again or try to reason with him I simply got up from the table with my cup of tea and moved to a nearby chair in the living room. He knew he’d lost me and he said, “Since we’re done here, I might as well leave.” And he did just that. He left.

After he left, I sat and watched the rain fall onto already over-saturated earth. I was done trying to make things okay for him. Or, for me. I wasn’t done with him. I was done with trying.

I HEART Cappuccino

I HEART Cappuccino

That day with my dad opened my awareness of the alternatives to suffering silently or forging onward even after knowing I’m done. It’s not that different than Sleeping Beauty after the apple fell out of her mouth. She came to and looked around and said, “Oh no, what the heck happened.” I felt that way with my dad, as if I’d awakened after a long sleep and realized I’d been waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did. And, maybe it couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t keep sitting there. So, I moved over to another chair. Then, things shifted.

[  space to breathe and contemplate  ]

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[  more space to breathe and contemplate  ]

For the record, my dad and my stepkids are important to me. I promise myself when it comes to my stepkids I’ll behave in ways that feel respectful of me and of them, in ways that add to our future and don’t trap either of us in old assumed patterns. The same with my dad. When he came to visit again, I managed to not fall back into my old patterns.

For so many years, I thought being done meant leaving and erasing someone or a relationship from my life. It’s been since becoming a stepmother, I’ve realized I could be done and stay.

There’s more to this being done business than meets the eye. Enhanced by Zemanta

A Healthy Stepmother . . .  Secures Her Lines 
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A Healthy Stepmother . . .  Secures Her Lines 

If you are living in the thick of it, with stepkids between the ages of 10 and 18, you need a lifeline. You also need an anchor line, at least one. And, while you may think it’s over-rated or there’s no such thing, you could use some laugh lines.

First, your lifeline. The lifeline is your relationship to the person who shares your bed.

That person with the other end of the lifeline . . . stay connected to him. Follow his lead. Trust his gut. Find his bottom line and let that guide you. One of the biggest ways following his lead showed up for me was in distinguishing between the day-to-day details versus the long-term picture. I felt I could contribute to the day-to-day and I had lots of opinions about how it should go. I pressured my guy, and pressured him more. Yes I did that. And, we might have even had a discussion or two, before he admitted his goal was to focus on the long-term. Finally, I listened. And heard. When I backed off the day-to-day focus, well, you can imagine how life changed.

Stay connected enough that you can ebb and flow, doing more and then less. Isn’t it normal to ebb and flow, sometimes projects require both of you, full tilt. Sometimes family schedules get zany. Maybe track if you’re doing so much you have to let go of the lifeline to get some of it done. Is that necessary?

Second, your anchor lines are nearly as crucial as your life line.

On our boat out on the river, when we’re having a lazy morning but want to stop and have lunch, we set an anchor. We face upstream a bit away from shore. We make sure we’re not in danger of bumping into another boat when the tide or wind changes, we drop the anchor, tie off, and then we relax.

If your husband/partner is your lifeline, your friends are your anchor line. Find a stepmom girlfriend, in person or online. Stepmother friends offer that steadiness we need to find reason in unreasonable times. They help us bear witness in the times we struggle and succeed in staying connected with self. Hanging out with them inspires hope for a more normalized life.

Stepmother girlfriends also help with the reality check. And we can use some reality, because it stinks sometimes, in the stepmother seat, living with kids hurt by their parent’s divorce and who struggle to let go 10 years after the split, or 20 years after, and sometimes not for 30 or 40 years later. Some will never get over their parent’s relationship ending, so a gentle reminder, it isn’t your job to make that okay for them.

Back Camera

Townsend and Lucy

Finally, don’t forget the laugh lines. The laugh lines are just what they seem. Lines gained by laughing.

When I joined my family, there were plenty of inside jokes that everyone else laughed at while I fell into my dark, icy chasm of isolation. It took us a while, but with my husband’s persistent dedication to inclusion and seeing life positively, we, the royal stepfamily we, found a few activities and comedy shows the oldest and youngest liked and some sports the middle kid liked, and we had the building blocks for a few good laughs.

We enjoyed many laughs watching the antics of our cat and a couple of dogs, sharing the annual Doo Calendar (sad, apparently this will be their last year) and the never-ending humor found in living with dogs. We dog-lovers even found a way to build a story around my oldest stepchild not being fond of dogs, complete with the photographic evidence to prove she had the littlest dog on her lap, once. She tolerates us humoring her about it, she’s a good sport that way.

One of my favorite humor gifts has been the Cartman magnet (South Park reference) my oldest stepson gave me. On my refrigerator, it reminds me we laughed together, and still do. He tried to make jokes early on, including giving me a nickname. I didn’t know him well enough to know whether he was laughing at me or mocking me, so I was not a good sport about it.

Dang, if I had known about laugh lines, I’d have the killer nickname of Kimmerino right about now. 

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . And A Certain Kind of Life

You dove into this life with all your good intentions and sweet affirmations bursting from every pore. You’d have drowned in them if you hadn’t had to run so fast to keep up with figuring out what to do in any given moment, frantically working to integrate with the new family of which you’d become a part.

You dove into what you thought was a certain kind of connection, with your husband, building a certain kind of life together.

Most importantly, you dove.

What would it be like if no one did? What would happen if there was only one chance on this planet to get a relationship right? Would there be no divorce? Or, would there be no remarriage? Could there be a civilization where people didn’t keep recouping even after disasters and traumas? What would that civilization look like? But, I digress.

Here you are. Looking around, surveying the scene, wondering what you might be doing if you weren’t here. Wondering how you’ll wait until five more years go by, or eight, or ten. Whatever that marker is that once it’s passed you’ll maybe have a better life, or for sure have a better life. Maybe it’ll be less stressful, anyway.

Joseph Campbell says “we must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

I think he’s right.

A Healthy Stepmother begins more gently.When we go in with such a tight hold on the life we are sure we are entering, there isn’t any space for what it might be.

If you haven’t been able to find a place to rest in your marriage, or even within your own heart, maybe some letting go is in order. Maybe the dreams you’re hauling around are actually getting in the way of the life that is sitting right in front of you.

Interpretation is a funny thing. Expectations are insistent things. Cultural pressure is a toxic thing. Add them all together and you might think that is the life you’re meant to have.

I’m suggesting there’s a different life, one that is just as meaningful, just as connected, and just as well-intentioned. It just doesn’t happen to look exactly like the one you might’ve carried in your head.

The older I get, the clearer the message comes, that to find satisfaction and contentment and any other measure of what I’m looking for, I must first let go of the thing I’m clutching in my hand or in my heart.

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A Healthy Stepmother . . . Renews Her Boundaries as Many Times as it Takes.

Updated post from May 12, 2011, A Healthy Stepmother

She closed the book and tossed it on the chair with a sigh. The book had been no more helpful than the previous three titles she’d brought home, each of them overflowing with opinions of how a woman married to a man with children should behave. Chapter after chapter the list of shoulds and shouldn’ts grew and grew.

She wished it were easier, to figure out how and when and what the issues were that she should bring up first, and second, and last. She kept hoping a stepmother would tell her story without advice, just lots of stories of this is how it went. Then she could use it as a place to begin exploring. Unfortunately, most of the books on the shelf followed tired self-help formats with lists of do this, but don’t do that.

She sighed again. It seemed such a waste. The best books gave information and educated about the process, the worst gave advice that made it sound as if the stepmother would complete the list of just-right things, the stepchildren would happily participate in stepfamily life. As if the problems in a stepfamily were a stepmother’s fault. Where were the books written to the entire family, as if they were a system that functioned together?

In the early days, she hadn’t known where to begin so she hadn’t set any boundaries with her stepkids and neither had their father. Then, when she voiced her concerns, a tidal wave of rejection washed her voice out.

A Healthy Stepmother . . . Renews Her Boundaries as Many Times as it TakesLife had gone on in that somewhat aimless way, not structured, not tidy. In fact, it had been messy and uncontrolled and unpredictable and unnerving.

But, she had let it be and waited and watched. During the wait, she studied. She paid attention and learned who her family members were.

Gradually, she began voicing her needs. If you want to swear, go outside. In this house, we respect one another. No, you may not go into my bedroom and search the sock drawer.

Gradually, what began as a small voice speaking out developed into a voice able to make the same reasonable requests any adult might make. When we enter a room or a home, we say hello. When we need something from someone else, we say please and thank you. When we are struggling, we say so out loud instead of lashing out with angry words.

Almost overnight, she felt better, a weight lifted off her shoulders. She ignored the sour faces and the surprised looks. As she spoke aloud and drew the boundaries, she began to regain her footing in her own life. She was so inspired she began caring for herself again.

She began to say whatever was on her mind, in a thoughtful way. She maintained compassion and kindness as her guides, and she continued voicing her opinions and requests. She continued ignoring the raised eyebrows, and most of the time she was heard.

She decided it wasn’t that bad speaking from the heart. It didn’t always feel easy or comfortable, but she liked the feeling of knowing she’d behaved as a real person and not a fictitious or invisible one. She decided it was not only enough that she feel real, it was everything that she feel real to herself.