WE HAVE STRUGGLED to normalize it, to sugarcoat it, to sprinkle it with sunshine. For decades, really, there have been efforts—everything from The Brady Bunch to updated editions of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care—to dispel the notion that stepfamilies are different from, or less than or more difficult than, "normal" ones. Certainly, plenty of research shows us that stepfamilies have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of. Exhaustive longitudinal studies by experts on remarriage with children prove that the vast majority of kids do well after divorce and remarriage. And as we have seen in chapters 1 and 6, after about five years, remarriages with children are actually stronger, happier, and more likely to last than first marriages. But the fact that a majority of children and partners of remarriage end up mentally healthy and emotionally satisfied does not change the fundamental, secret truth of stepmothering.
Stepmothering is born of grief. It is, at its heart, an unhappy business.
Stepmothering arises from, and cannot be disentangled from, loss. In all senses—etymological, historical, and social—the stepfamily experience is sutured to, inextricable from, the experience of mourning. The Old English form of the word, steopcild, also means "orphan"; the steop prefix derives from the verb astiepan/bestiepan, "bereave." "The sense is that an orphan is bereaving his lost parents(s)," one etymological Web site explains. Indeed, before the year 800 or so, "stepfather/stepmother" meant "one who becomes a father/mother to an orphan," and the terms "stepmother" and "mother-in-law" were used interchangeably. Distance; not being legitimate; being tacked on or after the fact by paper, rather than sharing blood; coming upon and perhaps even causing bereavement and mourning—all these senses are implicit in the term. In fact, the association between the role and loss, even privation, had been set much earlier: the Latin word for "stepson," privingus, is derived from the adjective privus, "deprived."
But in the twentieth century, as rates of maternal mortality declined and divorce became increasingly common, the sense of being orphaned or of grieving previously implicit in the word "stepchild" was largely lost. As this social and demographic shift has taken hold, we have become (we believe) "enlightened." Many of us—adults and kids alike—scoff at the notion that getting a stepmother is synonymous with suffering. But like a psychological resistance that reveals a patient's vulnerability, the stepmothering stereotypes we push away and deny reveal a profound and discomfiting truth. Despite our insistently upbeat, inclusive take on stepfamilies, the sense of grief associated with them, though covered over, is still there. The words, with their secret history, make it clear that something has been taken away. Death, deprivation, bereavement. Steps—mothers, fathers, and children—are still defined by that distance, that gulf, that space between them. The step.
"I don't like to dwell on it, and I'm not a negative person—I'm really a sappy optimist," a fifty-one-year-old stepmother named Babette told me. "But sometimes, it's really depressing. My son's brothers and sisters—my husband's kids—are so dysfunctional, so screwed up, so angry. So my son doesn't have anybody but us. I get so upset about it." Another stepmother, forty-year-old Dora, expressed it this way:
Sometimes I freak out. What if [my little girls] end up like [their stepsister]? And what if she turns my girls against me? I'm kind of an older mom, and I have these times of overwhelming sadness where I fantasize that I'm going to die before the girls are grown, and she's going to be involved somehow in their growing up and turn them against me. I actually wrote a letter to my girls explaining my side of things, and I was crying when I wrote it. I carry these feelings around with me, in the back of my mind.
Other women told me of the sadness of being worn down, day after day, by being disliked by their stepchildren, and of having no control over how they are seen. I'm nice, at least a dozen women with stepkids told me in so many words. I really am! For some women, there is the unutterable sadness of not being part of a "normal" family, of feeling responsible for or battered by tensions that are absent in first families, which we may fantasize about as the way things might have been, a loss that can feel unbearable. More than one woman told me that she had taken on her husband's grief for him: "[His children] ostracize him, and he doesn't deserve it," a stepmother named Gabby said. "When they don't call him on Father's Day, I want to die from the look of sadness on his face." As for the woman whose husband decides that he is not up for having more children after all, despite promising as much, sadness and anger may engulf her, leaving her with a sense that there is nothing else left.
Of course, all stepmothering scenarios are not so dire as these, and some days Babette, Dora, and Gabby feel just fine. They may even have wonderful, conflict-free weeks and months at a time with their husbands' kids. But I did not interview a single woman who reported a completely happy or even mostly stress-free stepmothering experience. Once we acknowledge our unhappiness, where can we go with it? How can we overcome our tendency to dismiss or overlook it without being consumed by it? And when will we cease comparing it to what a child or a father has lost?
It is frequently said that depression—the intense, all-encompassing grief that drains the world of color and texture and dimension, reducing everything to a kind of dead emotional flatness—may actually be anger at someone or something else, anger that we are afraid to express, turning it on ourselves instead. Conveniently and efficiently, depression is both an expression of rage and a punishment for having felt it in the first place. It is the proof, to ourselves and the rest of the world, that we have not hurt the other person, that we would never do such a thing: You see, the depressed person says, I am the one who suffers. We are strangely reassured, then, by our own depression, that we are not the kind of people who would harm others.
Especially his children. Depression among women with stepchildren is surprisingly common. It is well-known and amply documented that, in general, women suffer depression far more frequently than men. About twice as many women as men will become depressed during their lives. Whether this is due to biology (women synthesize serotonin half as quickly as men); hormones (their radical monthly fluctuation can have a dramatic effect on serotonin levels and mood); social inequalities (being disenfranchised leads to feelings of hopelessness, anger, and depression); or personal, emotional, or family history (in the broadest sense, it seems, depression is "hereditary," though there are conflicting opinions as to whether genes, socialization, or some combination of the two determine whether a depressed person's offspring will also be depressed), it is clear that when women enter the crucible of remarried relationships, we have already been primed for damage by the second X chromosome alone. And so while researchers have long focused on self-reported dissatisfaction, unhappiness, adjustment issues, and depression in children of remarriages, a few have turned their attention to stepmothers over the years. Remarriage experts Marilyn Ihinger-Tallman and Kay Pasley, as well as a number of other researchers and psychologists, report that stepmothers are dramatically more likely to experience depression than mothers. More specifically, clinical psychologist and stepfamily researcher E. Mavis Hetherington found that women who brought their own children to a remarriage in which their husband also had children reported significantly less life satisfaction and more depression than did non-stepmothers. Why might this be true? What makes stepmothers depressed? What puts them at risk?
Researchers who have taken on this question have discovered what so many of us have long suspected or, in some unfortunate cases, experienced firsthand: stepmothering is something of a "perfect storm" for depression. Marrying a man with children creates and sets in motion a number of potent, interlocking risk factors that can fuel and intensify one another, resulting in ideal conditions for this most destructive emotional experience.
Risk Factor 1: Isolation and Alienation
"In my experience, I have noticed that, compared to the population at large, stepmothers are more likely to feel—and become—isolated, lonely, and self-doubting," Manhattan psychoanalyst Stephanie Newman told me. I flashed back to my pregnancy and the other women in my prenatal yoga class. "Oh, built-in babysitters," they would coo if it came up in the conversation that I had teenage stepdaughters. They meant well, but their painfully naive take on my situation, and what felt to me like their insistence that I should be as upbeat as they were about it, left me with the sense that I was excluded from their world and a kind of bitter, shut-out sadness known as alienation. It seemed to me that I was the only person in my orbit who wasn't just starting a family with my husband. I already had one, sort of, and the girls weren't too thrilled that I was having a baby.
Although I knew how I was supposed to feel, the truth is that I was angry that they were so unhappy about what was, for me, such a happy thing, for pouting and retreating to their rooms for hours whenever they saw me folding baby clothes or caught sight of a book of baby names. I understood that this was difficult for them, a huge and frightening change. But I resented them, too, for acting as though I had done something terrible to them. I also couldn't help noticing that they weren't mad at Daddy about this. Once again, I was the bad guy. This realization, and my anger about it, compounded even further my sense of estrangement from the girls, my husband, and the world. And the more I perceived myself as having little in common with my pregnant peers—women in first marriages; women who were feathering their nests without the intrusion of resentful stepkinder and enraged exes; women who didn't have screeching arguments with their husbands about his teenage children's TV habits, temper tantrums, and hygiene—the more I stayed away from them and everybody else, and the fewer friends I had. Simply put, being a stepmother made me feel—and made me—cut off, different, apart. The eminent couples researcher Sue Johnson, author of Hold Me Tight, likens being alienated to "numbing out" and told me that it happens "when the sense of not belonging is so painful that the woman gives up or turns to desperate enraged blaming, feeling abandoned."
Other women with stepchildren report feeling similarly "marooned" in their family situations. Kendra, whom we met in chapter 6, told me, "I don't know anybody in a situation like mine. Nobody. I know a few women with stepkids, but they have a weekends-only situation. So I don't have anybody to compare notes with or anything. And when I describe my situation to my friends who have kids, they're very sympathetic and say, 'That sounds really hard; you can always come to my place and talk and take a break,' which is really nice. But it's not the same. They really don't have any idea what my life is like." The more lonely and isolated we feel, the more it fuels our impulse to retreat into ourselves. Our network of friends and acquaintances shrinks, and our daily interactions in the world dwindle. More and more, we are in our own heads. Particularly dangerous is the sense of being cut off from our husbands over stepfamily issues. This happens when conversations go nowhere and arguments go round and round, bottoming out in recriminations. After years of research, Johnson told me with all confidence, "Emotional connection between human beings is like oxygen, something incredibly basic that people need. It's wired into our brain by evolution, and isolation is actually dangerous for us." And so the foundation for depression is built.
Risk Factor 2: Rumination
It's not just the isolation that is so destructive to women with stepchildren; it's also the kind of thinking it encourages, says Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D., who studies women and depression. "When she's isolated and has no compadres, a woman is prone to thinking it's all about what she's doing wrong," Nolen-Hoeksema has observed. From there it's a short leap to what she calls "ruminative thinking," which she defines as "a cycle of rethinking the past, worrying excessively about the future, not taking action, going over and over the same issues, letting concern spread to other issues, until there's an avalanche of concern and a feeling of being overwhelmed."
Nolen-Hoeksema elaborates: "A nasty comment your stepchild makes about how you've redecorated a room reminds you of a nasty remark she once made about a dinner you made, which then leads you to remember her father refusing to acknowledge her being rude to you once, which then leads you to think, 'He always takes her side' and rehearse, in your mind, all the times you believe he did so." Women are far more prone to ruminative thinking than men, Nolen-Hoeksema has discovered, and in fact this snowball effect was amazingly common among the women I spoke to. (A perfect example is the story about phone messages in chapter 4.) According to Nolen-Hoeksema's years of research, ruminative thinking contributes to depression and anxiety, as well as to such self-destructive behaviors as binge eating and binge drinking.
What we might call the Bermuda triangle of stepmotherhood—isolation, which leads to feelings of alienation and also to ruminative thinking—is utterly overwhelming, a place where we risk being swallowed up, our former selves lost without a trace. Sally exemplifies this tendency to ruminate. She told me what happened one day when her stepson and his wife did not show up for a family event. "I just couldn't stop thinking about it" she said. "They had done much worse things, but this one set me off. I brooded and brooded, and the more I thought about it, the more angry and kind of obsessed I got. I just went around and around, like I couldn't stop." When we fixate or ruminate in this way, we lose hours and days of our lives and parts of ourselves. "It's exhausting to obsess like I did, and like I sometimes still do, about his kids and the stuff they do," Sally concluded. "It detracts so much from my life when I do it."
Risk Factor 3: Relational Tendencies
Sally is not alone. Revisiting our feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment over and over can be something of an occupational hazard for women with stepchildren. Laynie, a physician, told me that on particularly bad days with her partner's son (now her stepson), whom she describes as "difficult, difficult, difficult, so mean and rejecting and hostile sometimes," she used to stand in the shower "and wash my hair really hard, and while scrubbing and scrubbing, I'd think, 'Is it worth it to marry this guy? Because this kid comes along with him!' Over and over and over while scrubbing away."
As discussed in chapter 4, women are relaters par excellence. Liking and being liked are generally of paramount importance to us, a kind of interpersonal bull's-eye that makes us feel happy and successful. Predictably, then, the unremitting hostility and rejection that may come from our stepchildren can feel devastating. Failing to connect, failing to fix is something women take to heart. With our self-esteem thus undermined, we're increasingly prone to anxiety, stress, and feelings of worthlessness. Extended periods of experiencing such feelings can lead to—you guessed it—depression. Indeed, as sociologist and family expert Virginia Rutter puts it succinctly, "Women get depressed when stepfamily life goes badly, and they blame themselves."
As if feeling responsible for the failure or success of our unblended families isn't enough of a setup, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema adds that when a relationship is not going well, it activates and fuels our tendency to ruminate, which in turn fuels our dissatisfaction, in a cycle that can feed itself forever. We process and interpret and reinterpret. When things went poorly with my husband and stepdaughters, for example—which they did virtually nonstop for a couple of years—I took it to heart and took it personally. Sometimes, sitting in my office mulling over yet another terse exchange with my husband about yet another incident of his daughters' sullenness and general hostility, and his failure to support me, it seemed to me that in marrying a man with children, I had joined a cult. I felt as if I had renounced the normal world, giving up everything I had ever been and valued in order to embrace a new, draining cause—a cause that others didn't understand and that became the central focus of my life. For relational beings, this sense of apartness can be devastating.
Because women are more relational than men, psychologist Anne Bernstein told me, we tend to see problems sooner than our husbands do, feel them more acutely, and consider them more important to address and more urgent to resolve. This can lead to dynamics that stress our marriages to the breaking point. Not sensing the problem himself, or considering it a more trivial matter than we do, our husbands tell us to drop it or accuse us of being the problem. The predictable result: we feel betrayed, abandoned, and enraged by their indifference.
Bernstein explained that there are other dynamics created by our relational tendencies as well, such as "conflicts by proxy," whereby women married to men with children take on their husbands' emotional work, literally fighting their battles for them, acting on and acting out their unvoiced issues (see chapter 6). Bernstein told me that because men with children who remarry often tend to respond to conflict with paralysis (see chapter 5), are generally slow to know their own feelings, and are unaccustomed to emotional expression, their wives may find themselves in a relational back-and-forth: he says it's no big deal; we insist that it is, in fact, a huge deal. If our husbands then accuse us of overreacting and being irrational, this fuels further con flict.
The stepfamily is a tinderbox of sorts: our own relational tendencies, in combination with less emotionally savvy husbands and resentful stepchildren, can easily result in overwhelming conflagrations that reignite again and again. We may find ourselves trying to put them out for weeks, months, even years or decades, without truly understanding the dynamics that fan and fuel them. This work, predictably thankless and exhausting, sets the stage for a slide into depression.
Risk Factor 4: Overcompensation and the Need to "Fix It"
South Dakota State University sociologist Cindi Penor-Ceglian, Ph.D., has observed that "we are immersed in a society that promotes the idea that stepmothers mistreat their stepchildren." This central idea takes as its premise, and suggests by extension, that stepmothers are rotten, suspect, inherently bad, and this suggestion affects our psyches and our behavior. The lack of control over how we are perceived and what society thinks of us can be frustrating, painful, and destructive. We hear that we are wicked, and we are prone to believe it, especially when the rigors of taking on life with a man with children bring out, as they sometimes inevitably will, the worst in us.
In our can-do culture, which so values personal achievement and pumps us up with the notion that, with therapy, discipline, and drive, we can achieve anything, we are more than ever prone to believe that our reputations as stepmonsters are of our own making and that we can unmake them at will with perseverance, love, good intentions, and effort. With the specter of the wicked stepmother floating above our heads, we are under enormous pressure to prove—to the world and to ourselves—that we are not corrupt or sadistic, that we are, in fact, good, even perfect and beyond reproach. A fifty-eight-year-old stepmother named Belinda calls this the "Cinderella-in-reverse syndrome"—the stepmother's drive to be whiter than white, better than best, and her tendency to overcompensate at her own expense. "Maybe I have a good relationship with my stepdaughters because I was always the one sticking up for them if their dad was being strict," Belinda told me. "I have always been the one saying 'Yes, I'll tell your father you shouldn't be grounded' or 'Get the more expensive wedding dress. That's okay—I want you to have it.' My stepdaughters used to always say, 'Daddy's so much nicer now that he's married to Belinda!'"
Whenever my husband tells the story of the first Christmas I spent with him and his daughters, I see how clearly I felt the unspoken but overwhelming imperative to prove that I was the opposite of an evil stepmother. In his version of events, I planned and ordered and wrapped gifts for his girls; slaved heroically over the menu; and basically did everything I could to give two demonstrably unappreciative teenage girls a perfect holiday on a platter. "It looks like a gift shop in here," my older stepdaughter pronounced flatly as she looked at all the presents—each one wrapped in leopard-print paper that I thought she would love and tied with a red ribbon—letting me know that she felt there was something not legitimate, something fake, about what I was doing. "It's okay, but it's not that good," my younger stepdaughter snapped when her father remarked on her third helping of dessert. I now know that to my stepdaughters, liking or appreciating what I had done for them that day would have felt a lot like betraying their mom. And while I felt unappreciated by them that day, I certainly cannot blame them; they hadn't asked me to give them a second over-the-top Christmas, one that they could not help but read as an attempt to compete with their mother. I did not, I realize now, make such an effort for their sakes alone. I also did it for myself, and for my husband, to prove that I was nice and generous, warm and giving. The crackling hearth, the popcorn strings on the tree, and the roasted pears in the oven—the Christmasy spirit I was trying so hard to engineer—would testify, I hoped, to the fact that I was the opposite of a selfish, possessive, uncaring stepmonster.
Other women attempt to prove their worthiness and goodness in different ways, largely unaware that they are doing so. One woman, forty-three-year-old Anne Marie, reported helping her stepchild with hours of homework every night and sometimes at the last minute in the morning before school. "It was crazy," Anne Marie, the mother of two toddlers and the stepmother of a nine-year-old, told me. "It got to the point where I had no time to relax and unwind before my next stressful day at work. My life was just consumed with his needs. I let that happen, of course. It was like I felt I had to put myself last where he was concerned. I didn't matter."
Why do we do it? Why do we try so hard? Pioneering stepfamily researcher Lucile Duberman, Ph.D., summed it up tidily when she observed in 1975, "A stepmother must be exceptional in order to be considered adequate." And try to be exceptional we do—at a very high price. In the mid-1980s, Canadian psychiatrists Kati Morrison and Airdrie Thompson-Guppy realized that something unusual, and very specific, was going on with a subset of the women who sought treatment at local mental health clinics. Twenty-two women, all of them stepmothers, came in presenting what the researchers described as "a clinical picture similar to depressive illness." But when the doctors looked more closely, they realized that this was depression with a difference. The symptoms these women suffered from included "preoccupation with position in the family, feelings of anxiety, rejection, ineffectiveness, guilt, hostility, exhaustion and loss of self-esteem." Looking at what was underlying these symptoms, Morrison and Thompson-Guppy realized that these women were actually experiencing a special kind of burnout: they had "overcompensated in their role by providing total care of their stepchildren, in order to prove that they were not wicked stepmothers." And now their psychological distress was coming to the surface. The researchers found that these symptoms were "remarkably uniform," so much so that they proposed the problems they were struggling with be thought of as a new syndrome, one they called "Cinderella's Stepmother Syndrome." Stepmothers who suffer from it have more contact with stepchildren than stepfathers do; are expected to, and expect themselves to, assume a greater responsibility for rearing the stepchildren than stepfathers do; and show as much warmth to children as biological mothers do.
Building on Morrison and Guppy's research, subsequent experts also found that stepmothers overcompensate for the "wicked" stereotype. In one study, stepmothers reported responding as positively to their stepchildren as the biological mothers did, and less negatively as well on a number of measures of parental control and warmth. Sociologist and stepfamily expert Constance Ahrons notes that stepmothers also seek far more advice and read far more books about how to be a good stepparent than stepfathers do. Working so hard and trying for so long will likely intensify the feelings of failure and rejection women experience when they discover, over and over, that they can't "fix" their stepfamilies.
Factor 5: Double Standards That Disempower
There is a fundamental inequity that many of the women with stepchildren I spoke with mentioned: Stepchildren are allowed, even encouraged (subtly and sometimes explicitly) to dislike and resent us. We are given no such permission or understanding. It is not at all rare to hear adults venting about "my awful stepmother." Compare this to the number of women who feel comfortable admitting that they find a stepchild of any age anything short of perfect. Stepchildren have every social support as they express their deepest anger and most unprocessed resentment; meanwhile, all eyes are trained on the stepmother, waiting, suspicious.
Once, at a dinner party, at the urging of my good friend, the hostess, I did an imitation of my stepdaughter ranting about how her life was a vale of tears; how she was persecuted by her teachers, her principal, her peers, her parents, her stepmother. It was one of those moments when you presume that all the parents of preteen girls in the room, likely to be putting up with the same kind of behavior every day, will laugh with recognition and bond. Which we did. Except for one. "Oh, that's really nice," a woman in her forties hissed at me, turning on her heel and walking away.
Later, I tracked her down to apologize for having offended her and to find out what, precisely, had made her so upset. She told me that her father had divorced her mother and remarried when she was a teenager. As we talked, we realized that we had children the same age. But she was a stepdaughter herself, a stepdaughter first and foremost, and I was a stepmother. Perhaps in her mind, I was even her stepmother. And so, absurdly but inevitably, a line was draw in the sand. She was wary; the exchange did not segue into friendly chatter about kids and schools as it likely would have otherwise; the ice was not broken. I apologized—for what, I don't know. Had I made her father leave her mother? Had my husband left his wife for me? No, and no again. And if my husband had, so what? What on earth, I wondered with a certain outraged bewilderment, did my situation with my teenage stepdaughter have to do with this woman's experience with her stepmother? We were in our respective corners, the stepmother and the stepchild. Even though we were strangers and I was some ten years younger than she, the dynamic had been reactivated. She was not going to warm up to me, or acknowledge that I had some nice qualities, or even speak to me: Stepmonster.
Risk Factor 6: Punching Bag Syndrome
The struggle to be perfect (or even just good) and loved (or even just liked), women with stepchildren know, is more than merely thankless. It is sometimes downright masochistic. "Tell me something I don't know," more than one woman with stepkids snorted when I mentioned studies validating her feeling that her stepkids blamed her for everything. Our sense that we get blamed for things that aren't our fault is amply documented by stepfamily researchers and experts, who confirm that much of a child's resentment and anger at Dad is likely to be projected onto Stepmom. Why might this be? Why blame Stepmom for Dad leaving Mom (which stepkids tend to do even if he was divorced for years before he even met her)? Why the anger at Stepmom when Dad sets limits about behavior or says no to a loan? We may, in fact, have advocated for new rules and the like, and his kids may resent us for doing so. But they also tend to let Dad off the hook. Anne Bernstein says this happens because stepmothers are, in some way, more expendable, less loved, and so less scary to confront. She writes:
Step[mothers] can be a free-fire zone in families, detouring parent-child conflicts that may be scarier to deal with. One 13-year-old boy clearly stated that he enjoyed getting his stepmother worked up; it was obviously safer to provoke her than the father who was ... more loved. Even as adults, stepchildren may focus on the stepparent as the cause of either childhood or continued unhappiness, diverting their gaze from their parents.
One man I interviewed—whose parents divorced and then both remarried when he was in his late teens—epitomizes the tendency to blame one's stepmother. Tommy is a mild person, a successful commercial artist who is wry, self-deprecating, thoughtful, and sensitive in his assessments of his family story. After telling me that he's never had any problems with his stepfather, he referred to his stepmother as "a fucking witch." A few minutes later, he admitted that in some ways, she is "sweet, very, very sweet, and incredibly vulnerable. She is someone who never made much of her life, and she's probably actually depressed. She never worked or had a career or anything ... and I have no respect for her for that. It's like she just wants to be kept." He was sure that his stepmother was behind his father's lack of financial generosity. "Sometimes," he said, "I would ask my father for something—a plane ticket, money for the doctor, whatever, and when we spoke about it later, he'd say, 'Your stepmother's not into it.'"
Did he think this was an excuse his father used, that his father hid behind his wife in order to avoid saying no himself? I asked. Tommy paused, then said, "Well, I think he won't stand up to her." I considered this sentence, and all it implied, and said nothing. "Maybe that's just me giving him a pass and blaming her," he mused. A few minutes later, he told me that his stepmother often called spontaneously and left messages to say that she missed him and loved him, inviting him to come visit his father and her in Arizona. "Anybody else who heard that would think she's nice and normal," he said, shaking his head, "but I know what she's really like." For the next hour, Tommy spoke about how angry he was at his father. At one point, he circled back to the past, when he was a teenager, and mentioned how miserable he had found the twice-weekly "family dinners" with his father and stepmother, "because they were always tense and fighting."
From my vantage point, I could vividly imagine what it might be like to have an unenthusiastic, resentful teenager show up for dinner a couple of times a week. Did Tommy consider whether his stepmother and father had been tense because he was around—that there may have been disagreement between his father and stepmother about how Tommy was being raised or how he should act in their house? Tommy seemed genuinely surprised by my question. "No no no," he told me emphatically. "They didn't fight about me. They just ... fought all the time." I didn't understand how he could be so sure, and I did not ask. What I noticed was the alacrity with which he dismissed a notion that had never even occurred to him yet seemed obvious to me, a stepmother myself.
After the interview, Tommy e-mailed me an apology "for going on and on like that." When I called to reassure him that I had found his thoughts very interesting and helpful, he told me, "The real anger I have is at him, I think, and she's just baggage around him, sort of like a layer." Tommy's stepmother is lucky that her stepson can acknowledge his father's failings rather than continue to hold her responsible for all of them. Many stepchildren never recognize that, using their stepmother as a screen for their projected anger forever. But the fact that someone as mature and intelligent as Tommy had no idea that his own behavior might have caused friction between his father and stepmother was sobering to me.
Risk Factor 7: Unsupportive Husbands
A woman's husband can make all the difference in her adjustment to a remarriage with children and to the smooth functioning of the family (see chapters 5 and 6). One study, however, found that nearly half of the remarried men with children interviewed expected their wives to be "more maternal" than they were with their children. Such expectations can clash with women's agendas and desires, especially when we are repeatedly rebuffed or disappointed in our attempts to build a bridge to his kids. And unfortunately, our husbands may make matters worse by telling us to "ignore it" or "just let it go—what's the big deal?" when we complain about a problem with his kids, point out something questionable about his behavior, or simply try to vent. This adds to the already stressful mix a feeling of being belittled or dismissed, and even of mattering less. At the extreme end of the spectrum, many of us may find that we have lost our voice. Peggy, a fifty-eight-year-old musician, told me about a "family" trip:
We took my stepdaughter's daughter on a trip with us. On the plane, she behaved atrociously. It was so embarrassing—she screeched and demanded and sulked and threw a tantrum. She was six at the time but acting like a two-year-old. You could just tell she was doing it because she knew she could and was testing to see how bad she could be. My husband seemed at a loss. We hadn't been married for long, but I couldn't help myself. I very firmly told her to knock it off, told her that she was going to get in big trouble, that I was going to cancel the trip if she couldn't behave. Lo and behold, she stopped. The trip was okay—she behaved better ... and I swear she loves it when I'm firm with her. Anyway, when [that weekend away] was over, I rolled my eyes and said something about how bratty she had been. My husband got livid, just furious. He said, "I can say that about her. She's my daughter's daughter. I can criticize my daughter and the way she's raised her child, but you shouldn't! You can't say mean things about her like that!" Boy, did I learn my lesson. I have never said a word against any of my three stepchildren or stepgrandchildren since. Not one word of criticism of any of them since that day. I bite my tongue. Don't ever complain to your husband about his kids or criticize his kids to him. Just don't.
Abandoning her own internal compass, her sense of what is right to expect from her husband's child (or grandchild in this case) and what she can and should feel comfortable saying about it, Peggy goes mute. But not expressing ourselves is hard work. Peggy's husband's expectation that she not be critical, which in turn becomes her own, comes at a cost to their marriage and to her emotional well-being. Any feeling that we cannot air has to go somewhere, and too often when we hold it in or tamp it down, it grows aggressively beneath the surface, blooming into a dense thicket of resentment, fear, rage, and even depression. His children (and in some cases, their children, too) and his expectation that we should love them can widen the gulf between our husbands and us.
Risk Factor 8: Professional Bias and Bad Advice
Lack of support from our husbands takes many forms, one of which is withdrawal. When our husbands won't discuss problems with us, we are left looking for advice and support elsewhere. Unfortunately, friends and family can be utterly clueless, if well-intentioned, when it comes to dealing with the structural and emotional complexity of stepfamilies. Indeed, partnering with a man who has kids usually sets off an avalanche of unsolicited advice—much of it emphatically delivered and quite often contradictory, not to mention useless. Sifting through it all, we can't figure out who or how we should be. But from the cacophony of righteous voices, we definitely get the sense that we had better do it perfectly, or there will be hell to pay.
Act like a parent. / Don't act like a parent; act like an aunt.
Keep on trying to connect with your stepkids, no matter how badly they treat you. / Don't extend yourself emotionally.
Keep trying; keep reaching out. Love conquers all. / Stop pandering; your stepkids won't respect you.
You'll get back what you give. Keep giving. / Don't let them treat you like a doormat.
She's tried so hard with her stepkids. That's why they all get along. [Subtext: You should do the same thing.] / Just check out.
Among the best advice: "This is hard. Find a shrink to help you." Turning to a professional certainly makes sense, but therapy is not necessarily a sure solution. Those "experts" we turn to might not be fully aware of stepfamily dynamics and the challenges of stepmothers in particular. Even a therapist who says she is experienced in "couples work" may never have worked with a remarried couple with children, and a "family therapist" is not necessarily experienced in working with stepfamilies. This is no great surprise. Despite the growing number of remarriages with children, the field of stepfamily studies, just three decades or so old, is so new that it might still be considered an emerging practice area.
Complicating the issue of finding a helpful therapist even further is the reality that in its earliest years, the field of stepfamily studies was itself biased. Research was initially dominated by what is now called the "deficit-comparison approach." Comparing stepfamilies to first families, psychologists and researchers focused on things such as lower levels of cohesion and higher levels of conflict and generally found stepfamilies wanting. The problem with such an approach, as Iowa State University sociologist and stepfamily expert Susan Stewart, Ph.D., points out, is that "the group that comes out 'worse' in these analyses is assumed to be inherently deficient" rather than just qualitatively different. Too often, these problem-oriented studies became self-fulfilling prophecies that exaggerated differences in outcomes between types of families at the same time they perpetuated the stigma.
Although most researchers have moved beyond such an approach, it seems that this perspective continues to affect the thinking of more than a few practitioners. A University of Missouri study that investigated the attitudes of 285 therapists toward stepparents and stepchildren found that many viewed nuclear and stepfamilies differently. Adults described as stepparents were seen as less effective and less well-adjusted than adults believed to be from intact nuclear families.
Another bias persists in the research being done on stepfamilies: it is stepfather-centric, focusing overwhelmingly on stepfather versus stepmother families. Since some 86 percent of minor-age stepchildren live predominantly with their mothers and stepfathers, and since we tend to equate families with households (as we can accurately and easily do with first families), stepmothers, with their "part-time" status, might seem less important to study than stepfathers. But this thinking is doubly misguided. First, residency is relatively fluid and dynamic in stepfamilies, with kids tending to move back and forth between households, sometimes for months or years at a time. So "part-time" stepmothers often wind up being full-time, residential stepmothers (albeit unofficially, since such arrangements are rarely registered in court). Second, a number of studies have shown that being a part-time stepmother is considerably more difficult than being a full-time one and likely more difficult overall than being a stepfather. In spite of these realities, women with stepchildren remain something of a blind spot in stepfamily studies.
In many cases, this results in professionals who fail to recognize quickly the external realities—such as loyalty binds and resentment from stepchildren, coupled with cultural expectations that stepmothers should "mother" their stepchildren—that tend to confound most of our attempts at stepmothering. Ignorant of all the typical stepfamily traps, such therapists may leap to suggest that a stepmother's problems are internal (related to her own attachment style, family history, or other problems) rather than typical issues in a remarriage with children.
Stepfamily researcher Elizabeth Church has noted that a number of her subjects had a hard time getting help from psychologists, psychiatrists, and others in the "helping professions," even some who claimed they had experience and training dealing with stepfamilies. One couple she spoke with, whom she calls Martha and Wilf, told her that the family therapist they consulted initially told them that they had traumatized his kids with their marriage. Feeling implicated and guilty, they did not return for more "help." Meetings with subsequent therapists did not go much better. Several told Martha that she should try to be more of a "mother" to her stepchildren, who resented her enormously. For example, one stepdaughter took Martha's makeup and clothing without asking and then failed to return them. When Martha asked for help in dealing with the situation, the therapist told her that "mothers and daughters always do that kind of thing" and suggested that this type of "sharing" would help them to feel more like "one big happy family." Clearly, either the therapist was not hearing that Martha found her stepdaughter's pilfering distressing, or she considered such a response "abnormal." The problem, Church points out, is that by "assuming that stepfamilies are just like nondivorced families headed by two biological parents, these therapists may offer inappropriate, even harmful, guidance." For example, they may recommend that the woman act "more like a mother," or, just as harmfully, they may fail to point out to the couple (because they themselves do not know) that a great deal of conflict is common in the beginning of a remarriage with children. Indeed, knowledgeable experts agree that one of the most important things a therapist can do for remarried couples with kids from previous unions is to help these couples understand that many of the things they're struggling with and feeling like failures about are normal. This is an empowering and profoundly reassuring insight, one that usually brings tremendous relief and helps free couples from recrimination, anger, and depression.
Two of the most difficult truths about stepmothering are that nothing is simple and nothing is what we expected it to be. Women who marry men with children get a lot that we didn't bargain for. We also sacrifice quite a bit: we give up the fantasy of the white picket fence and 2.3 kids; we forfeit the possibility of being the first and only in our husbands' lives; and we will never have our husbands all to ourselves. These are among the things that stepmothers forgo relative to our husbands and our stepchildren. But there is something we lose that has little to do with them, that detracts only and utterly from us. Perhaps most powerfully and most painfully, what we almost inevitably are forced to give up when we become stepmothers is the fantasy of our own goodness and inherent likability. We are, sometimes for the first time in our lives, disliked, rejected, resented, and misunderstood, yes. That pain comes from the responses of others to us, and it can make us reel. But a deeper pain comes from the response we have to ourselves as "I will love my stepkids like my own" morphs into the secret, ugly knowledge that we cannot. One woman wrote the following frighteningly frank letter to an advice columnist about her stepmothering experience:
I am ashamed to say this but I can't stand sharing my home with my two young stepchildren. My husband won full custody of them three years ago [and]...I live for summer vacation when they go to their mother's and visit us every other weekend. When they are around it is like having permanent, irritating houseguests ... I feel like a stereotypical wicked stepmother when I complain about my stepchildren because they are good kids...[but] I don't love them now and I don't think I ever will. I used to think that something was wrong with me because I could not feel love for them. When I was pregnant with my daughter I hoped that her birth would throw some internal switch ... and loving her would help me to love her half-siblings too. But that never happened. I am madly in love with my own child but still cannot feel anything for my stepchildren. In fact, most of the time I wish they would just go away so that I could live my life in peace with my husband and daughter. I fear that this will harm them or cause problems for them later in life but I also feel powerless to change it. The truth is that right now I really don't want to. I just want them to go away.
This woman's plea for help and understanding is so dangerously honest and direct, so uncensored, that we may wince when reading it. I can imagine stepchildren recoiling with indignation, anger, and righteousness. "She's the grownup," they assert, "so she needs to get over it!" A mother who has no stepchildren herself, or whose husband has remarried, exclaims, "What is wrong with her? We're talking about children. This is unforgivable. She is sick." A husband feels outraged at the idea that the woman he has married does not love or perhaps even like his kids; he might never forgive her for it.
Indeed, this woman did choose to marry a man with children, and we may quite naturally wonder whether she couldn't have seen at least some of this coming. But the truth is that when we choose a man with children, we are choosing him and very likely in the thrall of what nearly every one of us believes will happen: we will win his kids over, they will win us over, and there will be instant love all around. Then reality sets in: stepchildren can be irritating and rejecting; they can be downright hostile. Even when they are not, even when they are "good kids," as this woman says her stepkids are, they are not our own, and their demands, their needs, may fray us until we feel ready to break. Every woman with stepchildren I spoke to expressed, to some extent, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the fact of her stepchildren at times, of needing to withdraw, or occasionally of even wishing them away—just for a moment—so that life would be a little more peaceful. What stepmother has not felt the urge to banish her stepchildren, for five minutes or forever? The letter writer above may be at the extreme end of the spectrum—from overwhelmed to wishing them gone for good—but who among us has not thought it, whispered it, secretly wished it? We protest too much when we act as if she is entirely Other.
Stepmothering forces us, almost to a woman, to mourn the loss of a perfect, idealized self—a self who would never tell a child to shut up or get the hell out, a self who would never feel jealousy, resentment, or dislike for a child, let alone her own husband's child. That "awful woman," the one who wrote the letter, is not us, we tell ourselves. And yet she is. When we become stepmothers, and as we live it, we are changed. As we learn that stepfamily life is difficult, as we struggle to fix it, as we experience rejection and hostility and failure along the way, we discover, often with great and overpowering sadness, parts of ourselves that we did not know were there.
The good news is that a number of psychologists and psychotherapists have given much thought to how to help women with stepchildren. The National Stepfamily Resource Center can help you find the practitioners who are truly experts in stepfamily and stepmother matters. In addition, you might get a referral from another stepmother, if you are lucky enough to know any, who may also be able to lead you to a formal or informal stepmother support group in your area. Always interview a potential therapist before signing up for help. Asking "Do you work with remarried couples?" and "Do you work with women with stepchildren?" may not be enough. You need to ask more specific questions, such as whether he or she trained at an institute that specializes in stepfamily issues or is affiliated with an organization such as the National Stepfamily Resource Center. Also ask how many remarried couples or stepfamilies he or she has actually treated.
You'll know that a stepfamily expert really is one if his or her first step in working with you is "psychoeducation"—talking about what's normal in a stepfamily and explaining that conflict and difficulty are par for the course. "Learning that stepfamilies do fight and that there are insider/outsider positions in a stepfamily or that it's normal to dislike your stepchildren, for example, can make something that feels like a terrible personal failure feel normal," Patricia Papernow of the National Stepfamily Resource Center told me. The next step in couples or stepfamily counseling, she and others recommend, is learning simple interpersonal skills, such as effective ways to get your message across to your partner and to build middle ground together (as discussed in chapter 6). The third and final step is to tackle the intrapsychic issues. "The old bruises from your family of origin can come into play in a stepfamily setting," Papernow explained. For example, being a stepmother can be particularly difficult for a woman who never felt special in her own family or who grew up feeling like an outsider. Experts are quick to point out, however, that this third phase of stepfamily therapy should never come first. "When you start out at this level, the level of exploring each person's background and how it's affecting the family process, it can feel like villainizing the individual in a very tough position. [It's] almost like saying all the difficulty is her fault, and that is just so damaging," Papernow said. "You've got to start out by helping these women understand that difficulty is the rule here, not the exception, and that it can get better. Then you go on to the other levels."