STORIES OF CRUEL STEPMOTHERS repulse, outrage, and fascinate us. A stepmother who excludes and persecutes her husband's children unsettles and reassures in equal measure: she is unnatural, and she is exactly what we have come to expect. A friend in graduate school told me, contemptuously, "My father's wife"—she often called her that, and to me it sounded thrillingly grown-up and distant, defiant, as in She's not my mother, or even my stepmother; she's nothing to me—"is so nasty. She just can't find it in herself to rise above the cliché of wickedness." My friend continued to describe how, when she was in college and her father and this wife, his second, moved to a different part of town, they did not give her a key to their new house. I was shocked by this act of "exclusion." It was her father's house. Didn't that make it my friend's house, too? Shouldn't she have the freedom to come and go as she pleased? How could a stepmother so blatantly and shamelessly surrender to the wicked stepmother script—acting jealous, mean, and petty and shutting her stepdaughter out? She won't even let you have a key? And he goes along with it? Why? Part of what fascinated me years ago about my friends and their stepmothers was the part of the story that I couldn't crack, even with all my questions: How can your stepmother be such a witch? How did she get that way?
Two decades later, I have a different sense of things. I see what my friend's stepmother did less as an act of locking someone out and more as an attempt to barricade herself in. Often stepmothers seem most alienating to outsiders precisely when they are feeling most vulnerable and weary and are taking steps, after years of feeling unappreciated, perhaps even attacked, to protect themselves. A stepmother who is seen to be shutting everyone out, who seems angry, jealous, and resentful, or just plain cold, I have learned, may very well be at the opposite end of an arc that began with her being another kind of person entirely. After years of listening to stepchildren tell us, literally and metaphorically, "You're not my mother," we may return the favor, feeling You're not my child. And acting that way. Our motives, it turns out, are more complicated than simple tit for tat.
All unhappy stepmothers are, in some way, alike. In large part, it seems, we have our gender to thank. Women are relaters. We aspire to be the carpenters who put the dilapidated house of stepfamily dysfunction back in order, the "fixers" who bring "ex-children" back into the fold, the good guys who charm recalcitrant and resentful stepkids into Best Friends Forever. It is more than a desire; to us, such reality-defying acts feel imperative. Why on earth do we take on such Herculean and thankless tasks, even when we know better? Because we must. Experts tell us that a woman's self-worth, and indeed her very sense of identity, are wrapped up in, even inextricable from, her success in relationships. Sociologist and family expert Virginia Rutter, Ph.D., summarizes: "A large body of research demonstrates that women's self-esteem becomes contingent upon relationships going smoothly; it holds in stepfamilies, as well." Simply put, we need to like and be liked, and anything less smacks of fault and failure.
Our need to solve problems in a stepfamily setting, our sense that it is up to us, is deeply ingrained—the legacy of decades of lessons imparted by parents and society—and may be nearly impossible for us to resist. As Elizabeth Carter, founder and director emerita of the Family Institute of Westchester and coauthor of The Invisible Web: Gender Patterns in Family Relationships, puts it, "Women are raised to believe that we are responsible for everybody. A stepmother sees the children as unhappy, or the husband as ineffectual ... and she moves in to be helpful. Women move toward a problem to work on it—whether it's theirs to work on or not." Stepfamilies, we know, have an abundance of such problems, interpersonal snags and aggravations, giving us plenty of material for self-doubt, self-blame, and feelings of failure. In fact, James Bray of Baylor University found that stepmothers are more self-critical and blame themselves more than any other member of the remarried family.
In this, we could not be more different from men. Studies show that stepfathers report much lower levels of engagement and involvement with their stepchildren—as well as significantly lower levels of conflict, stress, and guilt. And so it is likely that whether they are stepfathers themselves or not, our husbands will be rather bewildered, at best, by our need to knit and our keenly personal sense of devastation when we cannot. This gendered disparity in how women and men process stepfamily difficulty can act to drive the husband and wife apart, increasing the wife's sense of disconnection and failure. We all know the feeling Brenda, the mother of two toddlers and stepmother of a teenage boy, shared with me: "Sometimes I hate myself for not being able to handle it better, for not making us a family, for always fighting with my husband about his son."
Failing to connect, failing to fix, is something women take to heart. Maybe that explains why, during my interviews, several women with stepchildren told me the same story, or a version of it, repeating on each other's concerns in uncanny ways. It is a story about communicating and not communicating, about crossed signals and the intractable sense of frustration and resentment that so many of us find ourselves experiencing over and over—"Help! I'm stuck in a movie!" is how one woman with stepchildren described it to me—when it comes to dealing with his children and the uglier, more taboo feelings they sometimes elicit in us. The story goes like this.
A stepchild calls weekly, or a few times a month, and always leaves a similar message on the answering machine: "Hi, Dad, it's me. Hope you're doing well. I miss you. Give me a call. Bye, Dad." In message after message, dozens of them, there is not a single hello for Dad's wife. It's her voice on the answering machine. It's her taking the message. (Okay, the stepchild doesn't know this, but still...). To make matters worse, she may have lived with the stepchild for a period of time, may have picked him up from the train station on alternate weekends and sent him birthday cards, or helped a stepdaughter plan her wedding, or otherwise rearranged her life and her priorities over and over, for years, trying to forge a bond in acknowledgment of the reality that her husband has kids.
She does not consider herself an overly sensitive person, the woman telling me this story, but she has to admit, the messages bother her. How can she fail to notice the fact that her stepchild does not so much as acknowledge her, again and again? The worst part is knowing that even thinking about it, even having feelings about it—about his kid never saying hi to her in the message—makes her seem petty. It is a classic stepmonster setup—nobody's fault, exactly, but somehow, because she has feelings about it, it becomes her problem. She can just imagine saying something to the stepchild the next time he or she calls: "Hi, how are you doing? Great. Listen, there's something I wanted to mention. I don't know if you realize it, but when you leave messages here, you never say hi to me, only to your dad. It feels a little ... hurtful. I'm sure you don't intend it that way." She could never say this, she knows, because if she did, it would merely provide fodder for the rumblings about her she has already sensed—that she's a control freak, that she can't relax, that she has to stick herself into everything, that she is incapable of letting stuff go, that she's jealous.
No, she thinks, she won't mention it to her stepchild. Instead, she mentions it to her husband in passing, not wanting to start anything, just hinting, hoping that saying "Funny, every time Timmy calls, he says 'Hi, Dad' but never 'Hi, Jean,' even though it's my voice he's hearing" will be enough. Her husband nods. He seems distracted, or slightly irritated; he changes the subject. The messages don't change. And after a few months of it, or a year, the woman is tempted to stop giving her husband the messages at all. Of course, she would never stoop so low—she tells me this part of the story in a rush, defensive, afraid that I might think she would actually do such a thing, suspecting that, in spite of the fact that I am a stepmother myself, I will judge her for even thinking, for one fleeting instant, about doing something so classically wicked.
She is frustrated and hurt, it's true, by this relatively little thing, which nonetheless feels, after all this time, like an intentional slight, a refusal (even if it is unconscious) to acknowledge her existence. But she is an adult, and she decides to be emotionally mature and direct rather than passive and resentful. Rather than letting it simmer and fester and become a bigger deal than it really is, she will speak to her husband about it again. Of course he will understand, she tells herself. Surely, he will tell his child that this "oversight" is a little odd and that it is only appropriate to say "Hi, Dad. Hi, Jean. Timmy here" when he hears his stepmother's voice on the answering machine.
"This again? You're making a big deal out of nothing," her husband responds instead, suddenly angry and defensive. "He's hardly ever here, and yet you still find a way to be critical of him. You're so sensitive. Why can't you just let it go?"
"I'm just pointing out his behavior. Why attack me?" the woman counters, surprised, disappointed, disoriented. Is she really so critical? She thought she was just expressing her feelings, asking for his help. Why are they once again divided as a couple at the mere mention of something his child has done? And are her feelings irrelevant, self-indulgent? Is what she's asking for unreasonable? She doesn't think so, but now she's not sure. Why is the burden on her, she wonders, to overlook and deny and pretend when his child does something she finds rude or hurtful?
The argument, even if it is short, feels lethal. It is their oldest, least productive dynamic, the fight they have over and over, the issue they never resolve. How can they be here again, back at square one? The woman married to the man with children begins to panic. She feels misunderstood, taken for granted, angry. Angry at her husband and angry at his child. Again. Again! It feels like a losing battle to be revisiting this wasteland of the bitterest emotions, the ones they forget for months at a time but that are apparently always there, even when things are going well. All over a stupid little message on the answering machine. For a moment, briefly, she hates her husband, hates his child, hates being a stepmother. She feels bitter. Then she wonders, How did I get this way? When will it get better? Psychotherapist Jamie Kelem Keshet writes of these feelings:
When a stepmother feels she has reached out to a child, the child's failure to reach back to her can be very painful. In some ... cases this rejecting may cause her to question her worthiness as a person ... Most stepmothers have ambivalent feelings about their stepchildren. A woman who is trying to acknowledge only her loving positive feelings toward the children and deny her angry and resentful feelings would be open to projecting her negative feelings onto them unconsciously.
We need to allow ourselves to be less than all-loving all the time and to forgive ourselves for responding like human beings rather than saints to the par-for-the-course slights and oversights from our stepchildren that often feel deliberate. "I feel like, to succeed as a stepmother, you have to be either really assertive about not being stepped on or incredibly self-abnegating," a woman whose twentysomething stepdaughter veered from being prickly and standoffish to blatantly hostile told me. "I'm not really assertive, but I'm also not the kind of person who can say, 'Oh, his daughter's treating me like shit again. It's not personal. Whatever. It doesn't matter.'" What the woman with stepchildren seldom hears is that her feelings matter as much as anyone else's in the family. Indeed, sweeping them under the carpet or tamping them down, as we are so often urged to do ("Just let it go already!"), does more harm than good, exacerbating irritation and annoyance until it festers into full-blown, sometimes even explosive, resentment.
How do we stop the cycle? To begin with, we might simply acknowledge that, whatever their ages, our stepchildren do, in fact, frequently try to exclude us. They do things—consciously or unconsciously—that make us feel overlooked, left out, unappreciated. They send subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle signals that they wish we simply didn't exist, that they'd like to erase us from the picture, or from the message on the answering machine. I heard one story of a woman who was not invited to her stepdaughter's wedding, after nearly two decades of marriage to the young woman's father, "because it will be too difficult for Mom." Her husband told his daughter that they would attend together or not at all, but the stepmother never really recovered from her hurt and, not surprisingly, ceased making efforts with her stepdaughter for a long time. Another woman, visiting her stepson at sleep-away camp, noticed that he had taped family photos up on the wall next to his bunk and meticulously cut her face out of every one of them. She told me that the pain she felt was made worse by the fact that her husband failed to notice and then made excuses for his son.
My husband said, "Oh, really? Maybe he just did that because he knew his mom was visiting." Maybe. Still, I had put a big effort in with my stepson by this point. And he wasn't six; he was sixteen. I was surprised and hurt by the way he literally edited me out after all we'd been through together. After that, I realized that no matter what I did, no matter how nice I was, my stepson wasn't going to embrace me with open arms or consider me family. I can't blame him. It's true; I'm not exactly family. Anyway, after that I realized I should probably focus on myself and my marriage more and put myself out a little less where he was concerned.
At other times, as we've seen, our stepchildren may seem to be masters of splitting the couple, shutting us out and manipulating their fathers. Taboo it may be, but anger is a logical and normal response. It grows as we discover that our stepchildren have an uncanny aptitude for making us look bad when they are the ones misbehaving. Ayelet Waldman nails this aspect of stepmothering in her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, the story of Emilia, who has lost a baby of her own and struggles to warm up to her husband's precocious, sometimes perfidiously emotionally savvy five-year-old, William.
One frozen afternoon, Emilia takes her stepson to see the Harlem Meer, a pond in Central Park. On this, the first day they have actually managed to have some spontaneous fun together, he slips near the water's edge, muddying his boots in the shallow water. Running into her husband, Jack, in the lobby of their building a few minutes later, Emilia knows that she is in trouble and that William will milk this for all it is worth. She is right: the boy wails dramatically as he recounts the story of his stepmother "throwing me into the lake." Emilia protests her innocence, but this is not, by now, the point. At issue is her husband's perception that she just doesn't like William or care about him. As father and son walk down the hall of the apartment to put the boy in the tub, Emilia feels shut out and set up and decides she has to say something.
"Aren't you going to tell him ... he shouldn't get so crazy over a little mud and water? We were having fun, Jack!"
Jack narrows his lips into a thin line..."You don't even give a shit. He's cold, and scared, and you couldn't care less."
"I do so care. But he wasn't scared. You know William, he's just being dramatic."
[Jack] leans toward me and says in a low voice, "You have no idea what your face is like when you look at him, Emilia. You are colder than the fucking Harlem Meer."
He jerks the door open and walks through it, slamming it shut behind him. Before, I was warming to his son, I was. But now his words and those unsaid have spilled over me like liquid hydrogen. It is his words that have frozen me, made me brittle and immovable. Colder than he even knows. I am white with cold.
Emilia's feelings—that her husband is taking his son's side; that she is unjustly accused but somehow ends up looking like a heartless, callow stepmonster who has mistreated his poor kid; and mostly her desperate fear and loneliness in this moment—are something many of us will recognize. What is not said to us and among us, what is not often enough acknowledged, what gets buried in the "you should's" and "you must's" and "you're the adult, so let it go's" is the simple fact that stepchildren are not always sweet victims like Snow White. Frequently, like William, they seem to be out to get us. Waldman gets at another unacknowledged but basic truth of stepmothering, too: it can feel like a betrayal when our husbands overlook or refuse to acknowledge something hostile a young or adult stepchild has done or said, or when they blind themselves to a stepchild's uncivil behavior, behavior that Dad would be unlikely to tolerate if it were directed at a stranger. (This phenomenon will be considered at length in chapter 6.)
William's melodramatic, divisive antics and his father's credulous response (the duped father) are nothing compared to some real-life stories I have heard: of a woman whose stepdaughter tried to push her down the stairs and whose husband accused her of "exaggerating"; of a woman who was literally beaten by her young adult stepdaughters before her husband intervened and told them they were no longer welcome; of a woman whose stepson spoke to her only in obscenities and whose husband told her he didn't want "to get involved in your problems with each other." Certainly, these are among the more extraordinary instances of stepchildren's unchecked hostility. But the combination of a child who misbehaves toward his or her stepmother and a father who fails to support his wife because he is passive or in denial about his kid's behavior, thus encouraging more such acting out toward Stepmom, is unfortunately all too common.
One option, of course, is to stick up for ourselves when our husbands don't and to assert ourselves when they can't, but such a strategy frequently backfires, or plays into the narrative that we are wicked, something we tend to want to avoid at all costs. Laynie, a doctor and the mother of two and stepmother of a ten-year-old boy, describes it this way: "There's a holding back and a level of consciousness all the time that there isn't with my own kids. With [my stepson] Teddy, I have to think about everything. There's always another process going on at the same time. Like with my own kids, they annoy me, they get a time-out. With Teddy, there's that extra moment. Will I? Won't I?" We may fear that something as reasonable as a time-out will cause a flare-up between us and the stepchild, between us and our husband, between us and his ex. As stepmothers, we are expected to let it go, often for years on end. If we can't—if we complain, set limits, or tell our stepchildren they're not welcome if they can't treat us civilly—we are being petty, stereotypical stepmonsters. Caught in this setup, we go silent, then get angry and resentful, and finally lash out at his kids, completing the cycle, playing our role in a script we never wanted any part of. Brenda, who always considered herself a fun, likable person, found herself trapped in this dynamic. "I don't know how it happened," she confided to me miserably, describing the downward spiral. Her stepson acted surly and provocative; she responded by complaining to her husband; he minimized her feelings and blamed her ("What do you expect—his parents are divorced!" "It's hard for him; you should be more understanding!"); and she became angrier and more snappish toward her stepson every time he exercised his unchecked power, power that had the effect of rubbing her nose in her own lack of authority in the household. Even if your situation is not as extreme as Brenda's or the ones I described earlier, such dead-end stepfamily dynamics can drive a stake through the heart of your marriage.
Our husbands, often either oblivious to our travails or critical of how we handle them, seem to live for, to relish, these small increments of time with their children—the very increments we sometimes find ourselves dreading. And this disparity between his experience of his kids and our experience of them builds what can feel like an impossible-to-scale wall between us. Inevitably, we are confronted with the simple fact that unless we are extraordinarily lucky and circumstances are just right (see chapter 9), we cannot like his children without reservation as he does, we cannot always feel enthused about their visit or the fact of them, and it is not always easy to disguise it. Paradoxically, admitting these charged truths will likely not lead to more problems but instead will lower the bar and our blood pressure significantly, bringing a much-needed sense of relief to what can feel like an endless struggle. Acceptance can also set the stage for us to explore just exactly what's under these feelings that can seem so overwhelming, feelings that may sometimes seem to threaten to blot out the rest of the world.
We know that stepchildren feel threatened, displaced, hurt, and scared. Less often do we hear how the stepmother experiences this reality: stepchildren, for all kinds of reasons beyond their control (and a number that are not), are also frequently angry and jealous, and they want us gone. Just as the wicked stepmother is a repository of the "bad parts" of the biological mother, a kind of splitting off, so the stepmother's "vengefulness and jealousy" toward her husband's powerless children may be a projection, one that allows stepchildren of all ages to disavow a deeper, more disturbing truth. Feeling decentered and enraged, envious of the woman who is now so important in the father's life, a stepchild may transform his or her own fantasies of revenge into a sense of victimization. "Rather than acknowledging 'I'm angry and jealous,' they tell themselves and anyone else who will listen, 'She is a jealous, angry bitch,'" New York City psychoanalyst Stephanie Newman told me. In other words, these intense and disturbing feelings are so hard for the kids to cope with that they frequently put them on the stepmother. "When I hear a story about a horrible, irredeemably jealous, petty stepmother from a patient, that is my clue to guide the patient toward understanding her own feelings of jealousy, anger, resentment, and envy," Newman explained.
None of this means that stepmothers don't feel jealous themselves. Sometimes, living up close with our stepchildren's jealousy and resentment, or coexisting with it for a weekend or a holiday, we begin to feel its corrosive force ourselves. "Those jealous little brats," one woman reported thinking jealously when her six- and eight-year-old stepdaughters sat on her husband's lap and told her, "Daddy likes us best!" In other cases, the jealousy is already there, spooling out from our own childhoods, our own personalities and pasts. Jealousy is the most shameful feeling stepmothers experience, the one we refuse to acknowledge and chastise ourselves for having in private. There is nothing quite so taboo, quite so ugly, or quite so cliched as a jealous stepmother. Yet underconsidered and shameful as it may be, our jealousy is real.
Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her groundbreaking work on jealousy and envy, defines jealousy as the feelings of anger, betrayal, and hurt that arise when we lose, or fear losing, a relationship that is central to us. The hallmark of jealousy, Klein says, is the three-way, or triangular, relationship—one person is jealous of the loved one's relationship with another. In distinction, she defines envy as the malicious, angry, destructive feelings we have when we believe someone else possesses a quality that we prize yet feel we lack. The qualities we envy in others, Klein writes, are tied to the way we define, or wish to de fine, ourselves.
Borrowing from and elaborating on Klein's theories, psychologist and stepfamily expert Elizabeth Church notes that whereas stepchildren are likely to experience both envy and jealousy of the stepmother, stepmothers most frequently report feeling jealous. Church's contribution to the discussion of stepmothers and jealousy is, first, to consider it at all. For as she herself points out, although jealous stepmothers are rampant in folk literature and clinical research about stepmothers, there has been almost no analysis of why this might be the case. Based on her own work with forty-two stepmothers, Church suggests that fairy tale portrayals of stepmothers are very far from the experience of real stepmothers, but these images do have a considerable impact on how stepmothers feel about being jealous and envious.
The real surprise in Church's findings is that jealousy turns out to be less a thing in itself and more a marker, a kind of detour by which one feeling masks another. Specifically, Church says, a stepmother's jealousy is usually "a response to feeling—and being—powerless and disregarded within relationships." Exacerbating the problem of acknowledging and processing jealousy are the stereotypes about it, Church notes: "Many stepmothers felt silenced by the image of the wicked stepmother. Some saw themselves as wicked, particularly if they were jealous of their stepchildren." Church discovered that jealousy in a remarried family system is really impotence turned inside out, a feeling of being shut out or excluded, and unable to do anything about it. A stepmother who feels jealous, Church suggests, probably actually feels disempowered but cannot articulate this even to herself. "It is important to remember," Church notes, "that this may not just be a feeling of powerlessness, but the person may in fact be powerless" (italics in original).
How so? What exactly is stepmother powerlessness? Church suggests that a few scenarios lead to powerlessness experienced as jealousy: feeling second best, feeling like an outsider, and feeling like a rival due to interactions involving our husbands and their kids and us. In many cases, such dynamics can be undone with simple psychoeducation—that is, information about what is within the range of normal in stepfamily life and steps we can take to ease situations that aggravate. I once observed a family—a man, a woman who looked to be his partner or wife, and his nine-year-old-or-so daughter—at the movies together. It was clear that the child was from a previous marriage not only from physical appearances but mostly from how they interacted. As they sat down, there was a kind of shuffle, an awkward momentary pause as the adults contemplated who belonged where. The man arranged things so his daughter was on the aisle, he was in the next seat, and his partner was on the other side of him. Well, that's better than plopping your daughter between the two of you, I caught myself thinking. Once comfortably ensconced in the middle, the man looked toward his partner with a sheepish grin, then took her hand in his right hand and his daughter's in his left. The woman gave him a look—a halfhearted smile that masked resigned irritation—which I instantly recognized. When he and his daughter got up minutes later and left without a word to his partner, presumably to go to the concession stand, she turned to watch their retreating backs, shaking her head. Upon their return—happy, voluble, laden with treats—the man looked bewildered at his partner's reserve and refusal to make eye contact, and I knew a complicated but predictable story was unfolding.
For an outsider witnessing the scene, it might be hard to fathom what was going on; one might even think that the woman was making a big deal out of nothing. But consider that this kind of thing had likely happened again and again. My best guess was that, like a lot of stepmothers, this woman felt, for the hundredth time, like an intruder on her husband's date with his daughter, and she wanted to strangle both of them. Moreover, she was angry and disappointed in herself for having such feelings. I wished, at that moment, that there was a pamphlet I could hand the couple on their way out. It would begin, "In a remarriage with children, the wife often feels like a disregarded third wheel. Here's what husbands can do!" Knowing that feeling stuck in insider/outsider roles is normal and that jealousy comes from feeling and actually being shut out again and again, rather than from being wicked and spiteful and essentially flawed, is a place to start.
In some cases, stepmothers bring something more personal to the mix of normal stepfamily drama, and our jealousy won't abate until we come to understand its very specific causes, which are often obscured. Without therapy, my stepdaughters' possessiveness toward their father and their feeling that I was a rival to be disposed of would certainly have destroyed my marriage. After listening to me go on in session after session about how competitive the two of them were with me—the snippy remarks, the pointed taking of my place next to my husband at the table or at the movies or in the car just as I was about to sit next to him—and how that behavior enraged me, my therapist helped me see the underlying dynamic that was making me so furious. Their feelings of entitlement toward their father—Daddy is ours, and we don't want to share him!—were tapping into my profound and heretofore unexpressed anger that I had never had much affection or closeness with my own father. Unconsciously, I felt that my husband's daughters already had something I didn't have, had never had, would never have: a father's love. And now here they were trying to take away the only thing that I did have: my husband's attention. I resented them not only for what they were doing (like literally usurping my position when they stole my seat or refused to let us have a moment alone) but also for what I had missed out on when I was their age. Knowing this has helped me a great deal. My stepdaughters are daddy's girls, which is not going to change—I am stuck with it. But I am not, thankfully, quite so stuck with my own deep, mysterious, and destructive emotional responses to this fact.
After jealousy—our own and theirs—our stepchildren's sense of entitlement is perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, the expectation that goads us most. The presumption that we will be there whenever they come back; that our affection for them is unlimited and never-ending; and that we will simply turn the faucet of our kindness back on, whenever they decide they're ready to drink its waters, regardless of what has passed between us—this is what most hurt and angered the women with stepchildren I spoke to. Cee-Cee, a woman in her mid-forties who is the stepmother of an older boy and the mother of a toddler, told me:
My stepson and I are quite close now, but when he was a teenager, he didn't speak to me for [many months]. He and his father had moved in with me, which is what I wanted. I wanted us to start the process of becoming a family. But the most galling thing was, here I was bringing home a paycheck and putting food on the table and paying the mortgage, and my stepson refused to talk to me. I mean, he would just get up and leave the room whenever I walked in. It was enraging. I wanted to jump out of a window. That was a long time ago, and we're through it. And I like seeing him, like that he loves my son. Still, when I hear he's coming for the weekend, I often think, Well, okay, but I'd have a better weekend if he didn't.
The stepmothers I spoke with returned to this theme again and again—the stepchild who does not feel or express gratitude, who takes without compunction, and the fact that, though we understand that this is how children tend to be, we cannot help but resent it. Sometimes this sense of entitlement and nonchalance about what they seem to think we will tolerate, the one-way nature of the relationship, is almost unbearable. This may account for the tendency stepmothers have to refer to their husbands' kids as "spoiled brats," "black holes of taking," and "ingrates," in tones that sound stepmonsterish to a non-stepmother's ears. In many ways, they are ungrateful. They did not get down on their knees to propose to us, and they do not feel obliged to honor and obey. This almost makes sense, is almost excusable. Of course they don't love us—at least not always or right away, and sometimes not ever. But what is harder to understand and to forgive is that so many stepchildren of all ages seem, like Cee-Cee's stepson, to want it both ways. Bizarrely, we find that we are obliged to protect them from our own unmaternal feelings—feelings they have provoked in us with their refusal to give back, sometimes, even so much as a "good morning."
Elizabeth Church points out that just as jealousy masks a feeling of powerlessness for stepmothers, resentment of his kids and our role masks a feeling of being overlooked and taken for granted. The stepchild-stepmother relationship is, more often than not, profoundly unreciprocal. And given the tendency of women to derive our sense of worth from the success of our relationships with others, this can be difficult indeed. Unable to change our stepchildren's behavior, we might do better by adjusting our own.
One woman's stepdaughter announced, for three or four years running, that she had a gift for her baby sister's birthday, only to show up each time with an "Oops, I forgot it." This same woman's older stepson would say he was coming to the same birthday celebration, then cancel at the last minute. In general, psychologists tell us, the stepchild's "gimme gimme" syndrome, her eagerness to receive, and her block about giving come from a sense of being deprived and a clumsy, childish attempt to set things right, as if doubling up on the gets could assuage the sense that something (a father, a family) has been taken away. By taking without giving, the stepchild turns herself into the center of a world she feels excluded from, thus reassuring herself that Dad's and Stepmom's love for her is not contingent on anything she does or gives in return. Likewise, the stepson who does not show up for the party can feel gratified that now the party is actually about him. Feeling decentered and dethroned, he puts himself back in the spotlight, paradoxically, by refusing to be there.
Knowing all of this, even understanding it, does not mean we shouldn't dislike this behavior or be annoyed by it. Denying ourselves the outlet of responding negatively will only backfire, breeding more resentment. The woman who told me the birthday party story vented to her husband about her frustration—luckily for her, he was able to hear it as more than just criticism of his kids, as he, too, was annoyed and hurt by the pattern—and then did some practical problem solving. She continued to invite his kids but didn't follow up with them in any detail. As her daughter got older, she never told the child that her older half siblings would be coming to the party, knowing that they might not show. She also opted out of what she called the "gossip sessions" when the relatives mulled over "why his kids might be boycotting." "I would just shrug and say, 'They're teenagers. You know how it is,' and walk away," she explained. By undercutting the drama, this woman put the focus back where it belonged (on her daughter) and also normalized the behavior of her stepkids, who after all were not being nasty or spiteful, just conflicted and self-centered.
A number of other strategies might help lessen our sense that the typical trying-too-hard stepmother things we do—cooking, gifting, planning outings—go unappreciated, in a way that often seems intended to hurt. Mostly, we can stop doing, not out of spite, but as a matter of strategy. For example, my husband cooks when his daughters show up. He likes cooking more than I do anyway, and if I don't cook, I don't set myself up for something stepchildren as a group cannot seem to resist: subtly criticizing and complaining about what we make in our (apparently presumptuous) attempts to feed them. In addition, most of us learn to be careful about birthdays. As one woman told me, "An e-mail card is just right for people who don't get around to saying thank you!" Cash is something kids of all ages seem to appreciate, and most of us have discovered that if we send enough to be helpful without going over the top, it is not so annoying when the recipient is too busy or distracted to acknowledge our gift.
Rearranging things on the inside can also help. Adjusting expectations and our level of effort seems to be the secret weapon of many women with stepchildren who succeed in overcoming resentment. For example, I have learned that a "friendly," out-of-the-blue phone call frequently presages a request for money. I am likely to get snubbed at a graduation or other big event if Mom is there—it's just too weird, and too hard, for my stepdaughters to interact warmly with me in that context. When there is a true crisis, the girls will always turn to him, not me, regardless of my efforts over the years. That makes sense: Dad is the parent, and I am not. The point in all these instances, it seems to me, is not to let it all go or be self-abnegating. We don't have to like being snubbed at events or being hit up for cash, or even to tolerate it. But we should expect it. And it's okay to withhold a little bit from them rather than to knock ourselves out and then feel rebuffed. In my case, I have become—contrary to my natural impulse, which is to be emotionally open and gregarious, as I am with my friends and my friends' children and my own children—emotionally cautious, even guarded, with my stepdaughters.
The risk is that in protecting ourselves a bit, we may unwittingly be turning ourselves into a stereotype—the emotional and financial skinflint of a stepmother. That may be a little sad, or a little funny, but it is also, we might remind ourselves, appropriate. We are, after all, their stepmothers.
Some stepmothers and therapists recommend a technique called "disengaging" as a way to reduce our anger and resentment toward our stepkids. Generally recommended in situations where there are extremely hostile stepchildren in residence and an extremely unsupportive husband, this technique may have applications for women in less dire circumstances as well, especially those with nonresidential teenage stepchildren and adult stepkids who are rejecting.
To disengage—to simply try less or stop trying at all—requires accepting a number of truths about being married to a man with children.
• They are not your children.
• You are not responsible for overcoming their upbringing or any emotional or social problems they have.
• You are not responsible for what kind of people they are. You are not responsible for what kind of people they become.
• These responsibilities belong to your husband, who will likely not raise his kids (or make interventions with his adult kids) the way you would.
Having accepted this reality, you then make a promise to yourself: I will never give them the opportunity to treat me disrespectfully again. Then you tell your stepchildren exactly what you will no longer be able to do for them: "I will not be able to drive you to school if you are rude to me. I will not be able to do your laundry if you will not speak to me in my own house. I will not be able to make dinner for you if you are hostile when I remind you to do your chores." Then follow through. If your stepson is rude to you while you're driving him to his soccer game, turn the car around and go home, saying simply, "I'm sorry you've decided to treat me disrespectfully. I must withdraw my offer to take you." With adult stepchildren, it might be enough just to tell yourself what you will no longer do: I will no longer tell my husband that his thirty-five-year-old son should go to a psychiatrist because he is clinically depressed. Or, I will not be involved in the planning of my stepdaughter's wedding. It creates a loyalty conflict for her, and I will not be the object of her lashing out. Or, As long as he is not keeping me awake at night, I will not get involved with what my teenage stepson does while he stays with us over spring break. I will not "back-seat drive" my husband about my stepson leaving his room a mess, sleeping until 1 P.M., or leaving piles of dishes in the sink. I will leave everything as it is and let my husband deal with it.
The goal of disengaging is to stop assuming responsibilities that are not yours and then feeling disappointed when no one appreciates your efforts. Once this happens, the anger, resentment, and other negative feelings will likely subside significantly. Tolerance and even affection will take root more easily, and grow stronger, in this terrain. And once you disengage, your husband can no longer be "the good guy" to your "wicked stepmother," and he will be more likely to step up to the plate.
Another benefit of disengaging is that the fewer the opportunities you give your stepchildren to resent you, the less likely you are to be a target. Advocates of disengaging insist that when we accept that this dynamic isn't precisely our problem, life gets easier. The overwhelming sense of "You're not my child!" may very well subside into something more like "This isn't perfect, but it can work."