YOU'RE NOT MY MOTHER. You're not my mother. You're not my mother.
It is the stepchild's most potent incantation—a warding-off, a provocation, a taunt. Go away. Leave me alone. I don't have to listen to you. It is a warning, a punishment, a threat. You're just an intruder, an afterthought. You're not real. It is often conjured as the ultimate insult—a slap in the face, cold water thrown on the ember of the "blended family" fire you are presumably set on nurturing and fanning, against the odds, into a flame. You're not my mother. Whatever precedes it, whatever comes after, it becomes the heart of the matter, obliterating all else in the sentence, the argument, the relationship. It is where everything starts and ends. It is a fact.
Talk to women with stepchildren, read the studies by psychologists, interview the experts, and the truth about stepfamilies quickly comes into focus: stepfamilies are different from first families. The notion that stepmothers and stepchildren should be able to coexist with one another, share with one another, love or even (sometimes) like one another without ambivalence—the kind of ambivalence that sometimes seems as if it will split us in two—is beyond wistfully sentimental. It is, the research demonstrates, wrong. A number of studies have revealed what may strike women with stepchildren as a stunningly obvious but virtually unspoken fact: stepfamilies are not as bonded or cohesive as nuclear families. The ties do not bind in the same way we presume they should and more frequently do in a traditional family; stepparent-stepchild relationships are not as emotionally close as parent-child relationships. In fact, they are frequently characterized by heightened conflict, much of it stemming from feelings of loss and loyalty binds that lead stepchildren to reject and resent us. Other problems include what stepfamily expert Patricia Papernow calls "stepfamily architecture"—the reality that someone, namely the stepparent, is the outsider in the family structure. Whether we live with our stepchildren or not, whether we have children of our own or came to his family as a single woman, we may fight the fact of stepfamily difference for years, feeling that we should be able to make us all closer than we are. Yet only 20 percent of adult children feel close to their stepmothers, according to a landmark longitudinal study by clinical psychologist and stepfamily expert E. Mavis Hetherington. Similarly, in her comprehensive study of 173 adults whose parents had divorced, psychologist Constance Ahrons, Ph.D., learned that whereas fewer than one in three children with divorced and remarried parents think of their stepmothers as a parent, more than half regard their stepfathers as a parent. Fifty percent of those whose moms remarried were happy about it, but less than 30 percent were pleased when Dad remarried. Inserting real human feelings and responses into these dry facts, imagining the lives and experiences behind them, drives the point home: although stepfamily life is not easy for anyone, being a stepmother is the most difficult role of all.
For thirty-four-year-old Ella, a social worker, the challenges are both internal and external. She and her husband have three kids together, and he has two from a previous relationship, all under age ten. "His kids live across town. When they forget something here and my husband wants to drive right over there and deliver it to them after they've been here for the weekend, right when my kids want to wrestle with him, I say, 'Hold on. They can come get it tomorrow. Or we can drop it off at school for them.' I want to make sure everyone gets their fair time together as a family." Ella also wishes she could have a professional photographer do a family portrait of her husband, herself, and their three kids. "The problem is that it feels mean toward his kids," she told me. "We can't do that. Or can we? I mean, we are a family separate from them, too. Right?" How "blended" are we, we ask ourselves, and how blended should we aspire to be? How close?
A few basic dilemmas create conflict for women with stepchildren. The five discussed in this chapter are by no means an exhaustive consideration. But based on conversations with stepmothers and experts, they are nearly universal. Just knowing about these "step-dilemmas" and seeing them spelled out in black and white may demystify them and help us feel less lost, less isolated, and less at fault when step issues threaten to overwhelm us.
"Ugh. It's just so exactly not what we are," a quiet and articulate thirty-eight-year-old woman named Annie, whose father remarried after her mother died a decade ago, nearly shouted at one point during my interview with her, trying to help me get it. "Blended my arse," another woman said with a laugh, summing up the general consensus among stepmothers I spoke with: the blended family—both the term and the idea—is a big lie. Virtually everyone I interviewed for this project told me that he or she disliked the term "blended family," which the media loves. For many of us, "blended family" may feel particularly disingenuous when we have children of our own—either with our husbands or from a previous marriage—and our stepchildren live elsewhere. For others, it feels like a negation, paving over all the very real bumps and difficulties and differences of stepfamily life, implying that they are soothed and smoothed—or should be, or even can be. In general, saying "our blended family," pretending to aspire to it, gives short shrift to what is perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of stepfamilies: that we manage to survive in spite of so much dissonance and distinctness, so many lumps. Stepfamily life is not smooth.
The National Stepfamily Resource Center, or NSRC (formerly the Stepfamily Association of America), a consortium of stepfamily experts and a clearinghouse of helpful information for stepfamilies, actually urges therapists and other professionals in the field to avoid the term "blended family" precisely because it engineers such unrealistic expectations and elicits feelings of failure and guilt. Francesca Adler-Baeder, coordinator of the NSRC, explained to me the ways in which the term is out of touch with the reality of stepfamily life. "It paints the picture of the stepfamily as one cohesive entity," she said. "But what does that mean for the child who has two households? That he or she has to choose? Moreover, research shows us that while cohesion is comparatively low in the stepfamily, the stepfamily can be functioning very well. People connect to each other in different ways in stepfamilies, with different levels of attachment. Making blending the standard can make us feel we've failed when really stepfamilies are just different"
Patricia Papernow, who does not use the term "blended family" in her practice or her writing, had this to say: "When stepfamilies 'blend,' somebody is getting creamed. Either the 'family' is using the old parent-child model and the stepparent gets creamed, or the adult couple has set up a whole slew of new expectations and rules and the kids are getting creamed, asked to move too fast." The bottom line, Papernow said, is that early cohesion or blending is an indication that issues have been swept under the rug. They're still there, however, and inevitably, she insisted, "they come back to bite you"
But many of us, including those of us who live its impossibility every day—or on holidays and alternate weekends—keep expecting that we can blend. Why? It is understandable, perhaps, that our husbands want to maintain the fantasy of a perfect family frappé—it would absolve them of a lot of guilty feelings if our lives were in fact an effortless, ambrosial smoothie, with love all around. Therapists are in the business of holding out hope and helping us feel better, or helping us live with our feelings. Perhaps that is why so many of them refer to their work as "blended family practice." Books for stepparents want us to feel encouraged, too, and optimistic. Sometimes, to that admirable end, they use this unfortunate, unrealistic term, perpetuating an unfortunate, unrealistic myth. But what about us, stepmothers, who should and do know better? Why do we continue to circle back to the blended family, embracing not just the term but the underlying notion that everything could be perfect, that it should be perfect, even though this idea often makes us feel frustrated, cynical, hurt, or somehow bad, like failures? Gabby, a vivacious woman in her fifties with three grown stepchildren, has struggled with the idea of the blended family plenty. She told me, "I have it in my head that I am going to get all his kids here for the Jewish holidays again. It happened once, and it was nice. Then when we invited them the next year, my stepdaughter said to my husband, 'It's been done already,' and my stepson asked him, 'Why do we have to do that again?' I was so hurt, I started to cry. I felt so dissed. I would still love to have them here with us for the holidays. I don't know why!" And she began to cry.
Perhaps the blended family endures because, like Gabby, we want it, because we need it. It is frightening, after all, to think that so many of us are taking a risk that so very easily might not break our way. When I asked Gabby why it is so important to her to have her stepkids around when they obviously don't want to be, and why she keeps trying, she thought for a moment, then said, "My husband's not young. We had [our daughter] Suki late in his life, and I'm not getting any younger either. I want Suki to have someone other than us, someone to help her and love her and make her feel like something bigger than just the three of us. And I want them to be there to help her when we're old and need to be taken care of, too. I just don't want her to be so alone, burdened with us, all by herself." Gabby started by discussing something very specific—her husband is older—but in the end, she circled back to the simple idea of family and togetherness, of not being alone, of something that endures. This, it seems, is what she really wants, and she will keep trying, regardless of the toll that pursuing this phantasm of idealized togetherness takes on her self-esteem and her happiness.
Every family culture is different, of course, as varied as the people in it. So it goes with our expectations and hopes. Unlike Gabby, some women with stepchildren may actually be relieved when his children opt out of a holiday invitation or a weekend visit, knowing there will be another chance and looking forward to a little privacy. But many of us find that we can't give up on the dream of the blended family entirely. It continues to aggravate and reassure us in equal measure, promising something we are perhaps too cynical to believe entirely yet too optimistic to renounce.
The blended family myth depends on and derives its potency from another myth, a notion just as widely embraced, just as dearly cherished, and just as fantastical—namely, that all women should love all children all the time. It is an unrelenting and pitiless expectation and makes no exceptions—not for the stepmothers of adults who have busy lives and careers and partnerships of their own; not for women who marry men with reckless, angry young sons hell-bent on alienating them or jealous, resentful daughters who wish they'd disappear. Somehow, it seems, we have gone from praising and valuing women who would sacrifice anything for their own children to expecting that women should sacrifice equally for the children who are not their own. Indeed, most books for stepmothers position the fact that we are not our stepchildren's mothers as a limitation, a sad, hard truth that we must work to resign ourselves to and accept. Often we hear advice like this from friends, therapists, and the media: "Don't start thinking of them as 'your' children, and don't ever refer to them that way in conversation." Or this: "They already have a mother. Remember that." But in general our culture refuses to acknowledge the flip side of the assertion that we are not their mothers, the ugly, unsentimental truth of stepmothering, a truth at once liberating and brutal: We are not their mothers. We did not give birth to them, and in many cases we did not come into their lives while they were babies or even toddlers. Our stepchildren do not feel like our children. And so logically, inevitably, many of us do not—cannot—feel maternal toward them. While we did indeed choose a man with children, it would be disingenuous (for most of us) to pretend that we chose the children. We chose him, and they came on the side. "You knew what you were getting into," unsympathetic listeners might say when we complain about our difficulties with his kids. "What did you expect?"
Stepmothering is a country apart, yet it is not so utterly foreign. For example, many of those who judge us most harshly for what we "chose" may also be in relationships that they "chose" but are less than perfect and sometimes conflictual—relationships with mothers-in-law come immediately to mind. Imagine saying, "You knew what you were taking on when you married a man with a mother. What did you expect?" Or perhaps our beloved husband can't stand our beloved sister. In spite of these other models of imperfect relationships and tensions that often characterize a marriage, the notion that a relationship between a stepmother and a child is conflictual or even less than perfect sets people on edge, because these dice are loaded; a woman who doesn't like kids—even those not her own—every second is "unnatural."
And so it is with great confusion and guilt that we find that our feelings for our stepchildren are sometimes markedly unmaternal. One stepmother told me, angry and ashamed, that the smell of her stepdaughter (not an unpleasant smell, just a particular one) and the girl's physical clumsiness nearly turned her stomach sometimes. "Some days I can't bear it," she confided urgently, convinced, it seemed, that this was a black mark on her soul. Other stepmothers are nearly driven mad by the mess their stepchildren make—at once an all-too-concrete reality and a symbol of everything they cannot easily put up with or overlook. Stepmothers tend to seize on these details, these grating particularities, as if they explained everything. In a sense, they do; they sum up our inability to tolerate the way a mother would and express, in convoluted form, our inability to forgive ourselves for it. It must be the tic, the habit, the smell of the child, the jumble of dirty laundry she leaves on the living room floor that we find so unappealing; it couldn't be the child herself. That would make us terrible, and we hope, we need to believe, that we are not.
One woman told me how enthusiastically she looked forward to weekends without her stepson around, clearly feeling guilty about it. Shaking her head, she noted, "I think I must be missing that chip: the mommy chip." She fails to see, it seems to me, that this explanation explains nothing at all. She won't know if she's lacking a mommy chip—maternal drive, maternal sentiment, whatever it is that she means—based on her responses to her stepchild. Mommy chips, if they can be said to exist, are for mommies. This truth is so obvious that we continue to look past it, to search for something more complex, more indirect, more tortured, to account for our ambivalence toward our stepchildren. They don't love us like they love their mothers, and it is supposed to be a dagger in our hearts. We don't say it, but how many times have we thought, Don't worry: I don't want to be your mother.
Mothers know that kids go through phases when they are more and less lovable. They witness their feelings for their children ebb and flow, subside and surge again, day after day. Mothers are used to feeling stymied, frustrated, pushed too far. They often vent to one another: "Why didn't anybody tell me my son would be even more impossible at four than he was at two? I can't stand him!" Or, "Let's send all the teenage girls to an island. They deserve each other." But when we become stepmothers, having these thoughts—let alone articulating them—feels terribly taboo. "If I told you what I really think and feel on the bad days," one women with a teenage stepson said to me, laughing, "you'd have to call child protective services." The mother's valve for letting off steam is not nearly as available to stepmothers. Perhaps this in part explains something experts have pointed out: that stepmothers—even when they are seasoned mothers as well—tend to experience difficulty with a stepchild as ongoing, unremitting, and overwhelming. For example, stepfamily therapist Jamie Kelem Keshet noticed that her patients who were stepmothers might see their partners' children "as having enduring opinions and attitudes rather than expressing the feeling of the moment." If a stepchild shouts, "I don't feel like talking to you—get away from me!" a stepmother will likely not just retreat. She may very well take the outburst as a statement of fact and avoid the child for days, afraid of further rejection and understandably angry, yes, but also taking the child at his or her word. Keshet calls these "literal and long-lasting interpretations of children's statements" and notes that they can drive a wedge between spouses as well as stepparent and child.
The tough times with his kids may feel especially insurmountable when a bond between stepmother and stepchild is not completely or incontrovertibly forged, when we can't remember the time when this teenager was cute and sweet and cuddly. The good news is that these difficult interactions may in fact be just what our grandmothers used to call them, "a phase." Research and firsthand experience suggest that the "terrible twos," age four, and especially adolescence are difficult times for a woman to enter a stepchild's life. At any of these stages, the stepchild, in the throes of attempting to individuate, rejecting adults and authority figures left and right, is at his or her most alienating.
The tantrums of the terrible twos are tough on everyone, but a stepmother is probably more prone than others to feeling personally rejected or implicated by a toddler's frustrations. She is likely to wonder whether she is provoking the child or creating stress just by being around. Still, two-year-olds become three-year-olds, with winning ways and charms. And as they become articulate, relatively masterful four-year-olds, their frustrations and tantrums may largely abate. Yet during this phase of development, they may become mouthy, truculent, and painfully direct. "I don't like you!" can be hard to hear from an otherwise adorable preschooler whose father you're dating or married to. In addition, four is the age of attachment to the opposite-sex parent. Boys become romantically and sexually interested in their mothers and, fearing the father's retribution, may shirk from him. He becomes, in their eyes, the ultimate rival. The same holds true for girls, who grow so attached to their fathers that they may say, as my older stepdaughter reportedly did at age four, "It's my turn to be married to you now!" Being the object of such possessiveness is likely to amuse and flatter a parent, and the same-sex parent can likely ride out this phase of being the bad guy with a laugh. It's not quite so easy for a stepparent. As thirty-four-year-old Lauri told me, "Everybody thought it was so cute when my four-and-a-half-year-old stepdaughter would literally walk up to my husband and me and pry our hands apart so she could hold his hand. I had to remind myself that she was only little!"
New York City psychoanalyst Nicholas Samstag, Ph.D., told me that stepmothers in general "may be especially prone to anxiety about their legitimacy." A stepmother may think, I don't really deserve to be holding his hand or spending time with him at all; his little girl does. As Samstag pointed out, this "would make the stepmother feel particularly vulnerable, even threatened by such a normal attachment." Although four-year-olds may be alienatingly possessive, rigid, and assertive, they are generally interested in interacting and forming emotional bonds, and these situations may resolve themselves within a year or two or even a few months. The woman who marries a man with toddlers or preschoolers has, statistics tell us, the best shot of all. The (admittedly exhausting) privilege of experiencing our husbands' children as cute, endearing tykes or preschoolers provides a larger context for the predictably awful 'tween and teen years, as well as the often surprisingly tumultuous young adult years, making them more bearable.
Those of us who come into the picture during adolescence, however, are most likely in for turmoil on a scale we could not have imagined. I considered myself something of an expert on teenage girls (I worked in advertising and had a special interest in the teen-girl demographic; later, as cofounder of a market research agency, I went on to study teenage girls in depth), but I often found my stepdaughters' behavior alienating, even appalling.
In fact, they reminded me of myself when I was in junior high—disorientingly labile ("I love you! I hate you!"), gossipy, and manipulative. Putting up with typical teen traits such as self-centeredness and selfishness is hard enough when the kids are your own. When they're not your own, it can be, and usually is, excruciating. As forty-year-old Dora told me,
I don't know how we survived my eighteen-year-old stepdaughter's visits in the first year of our marriage. There was always some crying fit, some drama, some bullshit, so that she could have all the attention and make me look like the bad guy. She'd say to her dad, "You're so different now; you're so strict ever since you married Dora. You changed so much!" and then start crying. This always happened when she had asked for something—money, a later curfew, a pair of expensive shoes—and [we] had said no. I used to see red when she tried to blame me like that!
This story has it all—attempts to split the couple, emotional outbursts that cast a pall over the entire day or holiday, and typical teen-girl self-centeredness and melodrama. Putting such pressure on a fragile new marriage can, not surprisingly, be a make-or-break proposition. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a strain greater than living with a teenage girl who is not one's own, and much research confirms this. Although teenage stepsons may be less overtly communicative and jealous, they are not necessarily any easier to deal with. Researchers suggest that boys are more likely to direct aggression, defiance, and rage at others. In addition, it seems that a divorced mother is, in Wake Forest University sociologist Linda Nielsen's words, "more likely to say derogatory or hateful things about the father to her son than to her daughter. This is especially harmful as boys who hold negative opinions of their fathers tend to hold negative opinions of themselves." Such self-esteem issues inevitably lead to acting out around Dad and Stepmom, as well as a host of other problems.
Adolescence and its attendant turmoil is an American cottage industry. There are literally thousands of books on the topic, endless talk shows dedicated to it, article after article in parenting magazines. This is one of the most dangerous things about remarriage with an adolescent stepchild: his or her tendency to decenter us from our own lives, to draw our focus and our energy away from ourselves and our partnerships, to drain us. Teenagers are utterly consumed with the huge task of forging and integrating their identities, a job that requires virtually all their attention. Moreover, sociologists have pointed out that adolescence lasts longer and longer in postindustrial societies such as ours. Even into their early thirties, then, stepchildren may tend, in the words of many a stepmother, to "suck all the oxygen out of the room" when they're around.
Experts suggest a number of strategies for remarriages when there is a teen in residence, any of which might make this volatile and exhausting time seem more survivable. E. Mavis Hetherington recommends timing the remarriage "before a child's tenth birthday and after his or her sixteenth." Miss those sweet spots at your peril, she counsels; otherwise you will find your marriage "on a collision course with a teen's developmental agenda" to reject and individuate. For many of us, however, that advice may be impractical or just too self-abnegating to embrace. Adults have a right to their relationships on their terms, and bad timing vis-à-vis teens and remarriage is something many of us have survived. In these cases, lowered expectations and a mantra such as "This is normal" can take you far. It always helps to accept that your "family" will likely resemble a "dorm roommate" situation rather than an episode of The Brady Bunch.
Most important, advises Albany, New York, clinical psychologist Lauren Ayers, Ph.D., who specializes in the treatment of adolescents, pay attention to your own adult life. For example, don't expect yourself to put in a sixteen-hour day with a teenager, even though the teen seems to require it. Limit your emotional investment in a teen. Separate your emotions from his or hers, and do not make your happiness contingent on the teen's being in a good mood. Your life matters as much as the teen's, Ayers emphasizes, knowing our tendency to give in to the pull of the endlessly needy, volatile, and demanding adolescent. In this regard, a stepmother can set an example for her husband, helping to free him from "shackled-to-my-tortured-teen syndrome." The other side of the detachment, and even the occasional dislike we may feel toward our stepchildren when they are in one of their less endearing developmental phases, is that it allows us to model a healthy balance between caring and letting go. My younger stepdaughter, for example, knew whom to turn to when she wanted to go to boarding school and asked me to help her sell the idea to her parents. I sensed that such an option would allow her to opt out of the charged issue of whether to live with Mom or Dad. Without parental sentimentality or guilt clouding my view, I also could see that we all might do better with a little physical distance. As it turned out, my stepdaughter morphed into an independent young adult at boarding school, and my marriage got a break from potentially corrosive teen-girl drama at close range. I am convinced that she and I are closer for it.
Patricia Papernow has some additional advice for surviving remarriage with teenage stepchildren. In my interview with her, she outlined her recommendations. First, keep activities with teens one-on-one (dad and child, or stepmom and stepchild), since whole-group activities are bound to activate a teen's urge to opt out or act out and to underscore insider/outsider dynamics as well. Minimize "all of us together" activities in spite of your urge to be the Waltons. Second, keep activities "shoulder to shoulder" rather than "eyeball to eyeball." Puzzles, movies, and baking projects allow you to be with your teenage stepchild yet have a focus other than relating directly to each other. Finally, remember that time apart as a couple is all the more imperative for the woman with teenage stepchildren and her partner—and just retreating to your bedroom at night doesn't count. A weekly date night can give the couple much-needed rejuvenation and relief.
Unfortunately, sometimes such practical steps might be too little too late. As E. Mavis Hetherington reminds us, teens of divorce are more than twice as likely to have serious social and emotional disorders. If difficulty with a teenage stepchild in residence is unremitting, a return to Mom or another living arrangement is an option that may merit consideration. Do not dismiss such alternatives out of hand as proof of failure or wickedness. Marriages require protection from the strain and drain that adolescents often create.
When stepmothers no longer live with their teenage or young-adult stepchildren, or when the stepkids move on figuratively (into young adulthood, college, work, and relationships of their own), a huge burden is lifted, and relations tend to improve. Their messes and hostility are less galling when we must endure them for only a day or two at a time. Rejecting behavior abates when a kid's focus shifts away from you to romance or choosing a college major. We may even find that we unexpectedly become a stepchild's valued confidante. "I guess I could be helpful because I wasn't a parent," Gabby explained as she told me about her stepson seeking her out for advice about safe sex. We alone, perhaps, have the capacity to care for this child without feeling quite as panicked or drawn in by the stomach-churning curves of his life's course.
Competition often seems to be at the center of the stepmother-stepchild relationship, informing everything about it. Competition over money, over access to the partner/father, over his time. Competition over influence, over who wields more power—stepmothers, whose arsenal is the present, in all its undeniable relevance and immediacy; or stepchildren, who have at their disposal something equally potent, the nostalgic, seductive sway of the past, with all its sweet details and sentiment and plangency. Competition is the elephant in the room, the big ugly boulder in the road that everyone is supposed to ignore. But ignoring unpalatable realities does not make them go away. Angie, age forty-three and married to a man with two adult children, told me this classic story about stepfamily dynamics.
They used to all go skiing all the time before I came on the scene. But I can't ski, and I hate the cold. Still, every year they start saying, "Let's go on a ski trip! We used to have so much fun!" It hurts and bothers me that they keep asking, knowing that I can't do it. Last winter, I told my husband they should just go on a weekend ski trip, and I'd stay at home. It seemed like a good compromise to me. They did—and instead of enjoying the peace and quiet, I felt left out and was pissed when they returned and the kids went on and on about how great it was.
Angie's story expresses what so many of us have felt. Our stepchildren are always there. Taking up time and space and energy. Demanding. Wanting. Calling. Asking. Being. Excluding us. Life is a pie, and because of them, there is less for us. Once we have to share in this way, it brings out the worst in us; the most infantile, regressed parts of our brains, it seems, are activated. And sometimes we lash out. But more often, like Angie, we withdraw, become sullen, lick our wounds in private. We might even nurture those wounds, encourage them to grow, with all the energy and conviction of the anger we don't express. Even when we have kids of our own—which is supposed to transform us and make it all better—we may still feel pushed to the margins when his kids appear. And, in fact, his kids may have just this in mind. The challenge of stepfamily life, the experts concur, is to create a scenario in which no one feels like an outsider.
Angie is an expert scuba diver. Perhaps for their next vacation, they could all go somewhere scuba-friendly, where she could teach her stepkids what she knows rather than being the excluded outsider on another of their ski excursions. Such simple changes can quickly alter unhealthy dynamics that seem set in stone. These strategies can mean the difference between a life that feels unbearable whenever your stepchildren are around and remains tense even when they are not, and a marriage that feels good and right all the time, even if it gets a little bumpy when his kids show up.
Other forms of competition, such as those over money and access to Dad, may be more difficult to resolve. The challenge here may be to simply take the steps we can, then put our energies elsewhere.
Competition over Money
There is nothing like money to bring the fractures and conflicts in a remarried family to the surface—or to create new ones. "If it weren't for them, there would be more for us," a woman with stepchildren seethes, depositing her paycheck and writing a check for child support. "There goes the inheritance," a stepchild cracks when her father tells her that he's going to marry a younger woman. We all know the clichés, but why is it so hard to shake the stereotypes—of the entitled step-brat or the rapacious stepmonster—even when we, stepmothers and stepchildren alike, want to be gracious and fair rather than grasping?
Perhaps, most obviously, the answer is because money is real, and it is finite. There is only so much of it to go around. It does no good to deny that the stakes may be very high indeed for everyone involved when a stepmother comes onto the scene. Just how threatening this change will feel depends on a number of things, among them the type of remarriage and the financial situations, temperaments, and anxieties of the individual players.
When a childless woman with wealth or a job marries a man with children, for example, there may be issues between husband and wife about whether and how much she will contribute financially to his children's lives. But overall there will be a relatively low incidence of conflict between her and his kids over money. When both partners bring kids to the remarriage picture, there is likely a feeling of symmetry and even less of a tendency to fixate on or argue about finances and fairness. Many couples in this situation seem to settle on a "mostly merged" financial strategy (for example, while they keep college savings apart, they may contribute equally to all other expenses—utilities, mortgage, food, spending money for all the kids, etc.).
By contrast, when a woman without wealth or a job marries a man with children or a newly married woman quits her job, statistics show a higher likelihood of conflict of all sorts. This configuration seems to bring out all our impulses to draw lines and create sides: My husband and me versus them, the intruders. Our dad and us, the real relationship, versus her, the interloper. Money is such a real thing, its value so literal, that we may forget that it is also a symbol—and as such the likely site for acting out a number of our unacknowledged, unconscious desires: to even things out, settle the score, prove our importance or primacy, even express our feelings of victimization. Those kids are a black hole! We're never going to be able to retire because of them! I guess we can kiss grad school goodbye—Stepmonster's redecorating!
Phil Michaels, a trust and estates lawyer who also teaches at New York Law School, has pointed out that, in addition to the fact that money is at once very real and very symbolic, there is a third reason it can cause friction between women and their adult stepchildren. "A generation ago, inheritance was an unexpected but welcome windfall," he told me. Today, adults frequently count on an inheritance and literally budget it into their lives. "So if their father remarries, buys a new place, redecorates it, goes on expensive vacations with his wife ... his kids [may feel], Hey, there goes college for my kids."
This enormous cultural shift in expectations toward a feeling of entitlement to a parent's assets, which has crept up on us between generations, can create frustration, mistrust, and fear on both sides. More than one woman told me that her adult stepchildren had lobbied their father to pressure her into signing a prenuptial agreement before the wedding, in order to protect what they felt was "rightfully" theirs. It goes without saying that such presumption and overstepping of boundaries, if it goes unchecked by Dad, can create hard feelings and uneasiness for years to come. As Julie, a fifty-nine-year-old woman with a grown stepson, told me, "I have nightmares about [my stepson] dragging me into court if my husband dies first. It's not like there's a ton of money. It's just that ... I suspect that me getting anything at all is going to [upset him]. He seems to feel [things] should stay the same for him ... even though his father remarried."
Like Julie, many women with stepchildren find themselves wishing for a solution that acknowledges that they have sacrificed and given much in a marriage, without shortchanging his kids in the process. This desire for balance tends to feel especially urgent if we have children of our own. Remarried couples with children may find that it's worth the money and time to talk to a trust and estates lawyer. "The trend is away from just divvying everything up evenly between all the kids of the two marriages, or between all the kids and the wife," Michaels told me. "Couples will come in and say, '[His] kids are older and everything's paid for. They'll need less than our daughter, who's only two, if one or both of us dies tomorrow." There are many paradigms for fairness, from splitting it up so that everyone gets the same amount to couples who vow to die broke.
Michaels offered one general and very simple observation: "Too many people—kids, wives, and husbands—believe that the material legacy is the one and only true communication, the ultimate proof." This reflects what so many family therapists have also observed: when a man with children remarries, everyone, not just the stepmother, may be required to make adjustments that are difficult, even painful, to their concept of what they "deserve." In their book Step Wars, Grace Gabe, M.D., and Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ph.D., note that most adult children presume that their parents have an arrangement whereby one will be provided for if predeceased by the other. That is, they know that they won't inherit Dad's money if Mom is still alive. They may not presume the same about a parent and a stepparent. If a stepmom's husband is clear about his intention up front—"I plan to provide for Susan after my death, just as I'm sure you plan to provide for your spouse"—there may be blowback early on but less ambiguity and fewer hard feelings (not to mention a decreased likelihood of litigation) down the road. Regardless of his children's expectations, every couple must come up with their own concept of what is fair. They may find that they return to and refine the idea as the years go by and his children get older and have kids of their own. Just acknowledging that there can be conflicts and hard feelings over finances, that money is as symbolic as it is real, can be a relief.
Competition over Access to the Husband/Father
Like money, husbands are a finite resource. There is only one of him, and he has only so much time and energy. Your stepchildren want it, and so do you. The solution seems obvious—the expectation is that stepmoms should be gracious and back off—but this battle can be profound, excruciating, epic. It is not just a matter of little kids wanting Dad all to themselves. I have been surprised to meet people in their forties and fifties—accomplished and apparently well-adjusted grown-ups—who clearly resent that their fathers have remarried and have less time for them now, or that they have remarried at all. Patricia Papernow shared an anecdote about a patient in his fifties, himself divorced and remarried, who was furious at his eighty-five-year-old father and stepmother for taking a romantic trip to Europe for their first Christmas together. "This older man had been a widower for many years and he finally found happiness," she told me. "It's not so surprising that his wife didn't want to spend the holiday with all six of his kids and all their children—that could be very overwhelming." Nevertheless, Papernow's patient fumed that his father was "abandoning the family." Papernow said that seeing a fiftysomething man act this way was "a great illustration of how powerful"—and I might add how unreasonable—"our fantasies that stepfamilies are supposed to be just like first families are."
Margaret, a psychiatric nurse who has what she calls a "nice relationship" with her stepmother, tried to explain how, even though she was delighted that her father remarried, she also had a kind of mental block about it. "Part of you accepts it," she said. "My stepmother is very loving, and she takes wonderful care of him. But there's another really primitive part of your brain that sees Dad and says, 'Okay, there's Dad, so where's Mom?' I know Mommy and Daddy aren't ... together anymore, but I still sometimes feel it, or expect it, like a phantom limb."
In order to set this wrong right, to rebalance the perceived asymmetry, stepchildren without Margaret's level of awareness may dwell on the past when they see their fathers. For the stepmother, this can feel a lot like having a door slammed in your face. At one point, my stepdaughters seemed unable to resist telling long, detailed anecdotes about trips the three of them had gone on together, adventures they had shared, and fun times with his ex-girlfriends in the time B.S.M. (before stepmother). Usually, they recounted these fond times when we were in the car and I couldn't escape. They might have been innocent longings for times past, but just as likely they were unconscious (even conscious) pricks directed at my admittedly thin new-stepmother skin.
After all, girls especially tend to compete with their stepmothers for their fathers' affection. And the competition doesn't necessarily end when they get a boyfriend or even when they get married. Many girls whose parents divorce never stop needing to be the center of their fathers' lives. All too often, they get their way, because Daddy, either plagued by guilt or gratified by the attention, allows it. (See chapter 5 for a detailed discussion.)
"Maybe Dad should get a boat, and he and the baby and I can go on it and you can stay at home, since you don't like boats," my stepdaughter suggested in her singsongy "I know I'm being provocative" voice one summer afternoon when she was sixteen. I might have responded, "But your dad likes to spend time with me" or "Maybe you feel excluded, and that's why you're talking about excluding me." Instead, I rolled my eyes and said nothing, quipping later to my husband, "Daddy, maybe you can leave your wife and marry me and live on a boat with me, and we'll have our very own baby!" My husband has a decent sense of humor, and from then on, we cracked plenty of jokes about the girls' apparent desire to get rid of me, jokes that reframed their attempts to drive a wedge between us as normal and funny. My husband and I had managed to find a language (the wisecrack) that both acknowledged an ugly truth of stepfamily life and put it in perspective. As far as I can tell, these issues do not ever go away, not entirely, in a remarriage with children. Attempts to put Stepmom on the outside are likely to persist as long as his kids feel insecure about where they stand. However, at the risk of sounding reductive, as soon as you and your partner both feel the centrality of your relationship, your indivisibility as a couple, the attempts at exclusion are a lot less upsetting.
Books for stepmothers tend to perpetuate certain myths. The myth of the blended family and the myth of the maternal stepmother are the most glaring examples. These books' relentlessly upbeat tone can make stepmothers feel as though our own occasional negativity and impatience regarding his kids are freakish. Other books on stepmothering are so lighthearted, so insistent that we see the humor in our situation and in our responses to it, that reading them feels suspiciously like being told that our concerns don't matter and that we just need to lighten up. But the real problem with many books for stepmothers is not what they imply, but what they actually say:
Remember that his kids will always come first.
Leave the disciplining to him.
You will regret it forever if you lose your temper or say something nasty to your stepchildren, so whatever you do, don't.
With patience and love, they will come around.
The fact that these directives have become a virtual mantra, the unassailable golden rules of stepmothering does not mean that they are right. For example, a number of stepfamily experts concur that in a remarriage with children, giving the couple relationship priority is crucial (see chapter 6). It may jar us to learn that our concept that "the kids are the most important thing" is misguided, even destructive to our partnerships. The ideas that you should be second and should accept it, that his kids came first chronologically and so are first in his heart, and that his believing and acting on these ideas makes him a good person are powerful, deeply ingrained beliefs. But all of them can be fatal for the remarriage with children. They are even bad for the children, giving them an uncomfortable amount of power and focusing an undue amount of attention and pressure on them.
Andrew Gotzis, M.D., a New York City psychiatrist and therapist who works with couples, echoed the advice of a number of marriage counselors when he told me, "In a remarriage with children, the hierarchy of the family needs to be established quickly and clearly. The kids need to know that the husband and wife come first and that they are a unified team." Otherwise, Dr. Gotzis cautioned, the kids can split the couple apart and create tension in the marriage indefinitely. To remarried couples with children, the scenario of kids turning to Dad when Stepmom has said no, or vice versa, in an attempt to split the team is all too familiar. A woman with stepchildren may exhaust herself with her attempts to resolve such situations. For this reason, sociologist Linda Nielsen notes that a woman with stepchildren will have more success when she adopts the attitude "My main goal and my main focus is to build an intimate, fulfilling relationship with my husband and to take better care of my own needs, not to bond with or win the approval of my stepchildren." Nielsen notes that a shift like this cannot happen in a vacuum; the woman's partner needs to be on the same page with her. If the marriage is to work, Nielsen insists, "her husband has to be committed to creating a [partnership] around which his children revolve rather than a marriage that revolves around his children. Especially when his children dislike their stepmother, the father has to make it clear that the kids will not be handed the power or given the precedence over his marriage."
"Things didn't improve until I let my daughter know that, even though I loved her, my ultimate loyalty was to my wife," one man who had survived a rocky early remarriage with children observed. We can only imagine the resultant fireworks in that household. But the outcome was a stronger marriage. This in turn gave his daughter proof that marriages can last. It also replaced what could have become profound confusion about her unchecked power in the family with a sense of secure belonging.
As for the advice "Leave the disciplining to him," whoever said it never went to a home while the stepkids were visiting and their father was out. Certainly, no one is saying to step right in and start issuing orders to your stepkids in your first days and weeks together—and few of us are likely to do that, fearing that we will be perceived as wicked. But what works in theory—you should hold back more or less indefinitely so that you don't seem like the villain, backing up your husband rather than doing things yourself—doesn't always work in practice. What happens when a stepchild does something that crosses the line but hubby isn't around? Are you to sit on your hands and bite your tongue rather than issue a firm "That's not okay, and you know it"? Moreover, firsthand experience has often demonstrated that the longer a woman with stepchildren waits, the harder it is for her ever to draw the line or be taken seriously as an adult with authority. I can attest to this fact. Because I was more or less a fraidy cat in the first year of my marriage, I had to be a tiger for the subsequent two or three years, as my stepdaughters still occasionally tried to walk all over me, just to see if they could. This was hardly their fault; I waited ages to take a stand about things such as snide remarks, dumping suitcases in the middle of the floor, and ignoring me.
Sometimes it is easier and smarter to ignore a stepchild's annoying habit, to decline to get involved in an emotion-charged discussion over her sweet sixteen party, or to be the voice of reason when planning her wedding. A number of women with stepchildren have found that "disengaging" is, in some situations, far and away the best strategy for them (see chapter 4). Other times, ignoring bad behavior just feels like being stepped on and creates a breeding ground for more resentment. And then what?
The culture at large is eager to gloss over women's anger in general, and advice for stepmothers in particular is full of warnings that if we express it, the consequences will be dire and irreversible. This strikes me as absurd. It would be the rare stepchild who never went through a phase of wanting to provoke his or her stepmom. Of course we lose our tempers, inevitably. And although it can feel catastrophic—What if they hate me? What if they think I'm wicked?—expressing our anger is, in my opinion, something we should do sooner rather than later. Otherwise, we risk setting the bar too impossibly high for everyone and creating a situation in which kids, teens, or even adult stepchildren go on pushing our buttons forever in an attempt to see where our limit is. Most of all, we need to learn as soon as possible—to experience firsthand—that being disliked is an occupational hazard for stepmothers, not a referendum on our worth. "Dad's girlfriend Laura yelled at us once in the car," my stepdaughter told me solemnly in our early days together. I didn't know exactly why she was telling me this, but I knew how Laura must have felt, and I admired her for letting the girls know when she thought they'd gone too far.
You're not my mother! Most of us fear that it is yelling or disciplining or losing our tempers or not being nice enough or patient enough or selfless enough that will keep our husbands' children from accepting us or drive them away. If only we had so much control. Instead, unrealistic expectations about blending and being maternal, difficult developmental stages, competition that is largely inevitable and unavoidable, misinformation about stepmothering, and a host of other factors play a bigger role in the way a reconfigured family group coheres—or doesn't. We are not, in fact, their mothers. Happily ever after and happiness all around are ideals—unlikely ones at that, even in traditional nuclear families. Eventually, we may find that we have arrived at a place of comfort, familiarity, and real pleasure with our husbands' kids. But if our happiness is contingent on his kids being happy for us, being happy with us, and loving us, then we have given away our greatest power and put everything at risk.