Introduction

My marriage was meant to be. It was also doomed to fail. You see, I chose a man with children. Experts estimate that more than half of all adult women in the United States will do the same in their lifetimes and that up to 70 percent of those partnerships will fail. Factor in all the odds and on the day I said "I do," I might as well have picked out a divorce lawyer as well. The greatest predictor of divorce is the presence of children from a previous marriage. In fact, divorce rates are 50 percent higher in remarriages with children than in those without. Even more alarming for my marriage, according to the statistics that I was blessedly unaware of until after I committed myself for life, was the fact that my husband had not one but two teenage daughters and was living with one of them when we got engaged. (Unbeknownst to me, some experts recommend delaying marriage to a partner whose child is between the ages of ten and sixteen, so great are the risks of conflict for the couple and the household during that particular period of a child's development.) The final high-risk factor: I was a childless woman marrying a man with children. (Some research suggests that women with their own children fare better in a marriage to a man with children, although they face a whole different set of emotional and practical challenges.) The chances of our union surviving were arguably in the realm of the hypothetical.

And I had no idea. Not because everything was fine—from the very first moment, things hadn't been fine, exactly—but because I had my head placed firmly in the sand. I wanted this thing to work. I wanted a wedding and a happy ending, and I was going to ignore everything and anything I had to in order to make it happen. When a coworker, a stepson himself, advised that I should run from my boyfriend as fast as I could owing to a less-than-ideal co-parenting situation with his ex-wife, I attributed it to sour grapes. When a friend saw a picture of my stepdaughter-to-be (looking every inch the rebellious preteen she was) and commented, "Uh-oh," I pretended not to hear. And whenever I came across books or articles about stepmothering, I rolled my eyes, if I noticed them at all. They were full of gloom and bland advice—from where I stood in those early, "everything's great" days—and stuff about other people. None of that was going to happen to me. I was nice; I was fun; I was young(ish). Step-hell was for stepmonsters, and I wasn't going there. Until I was.

We were going to find a wedding dress.

It was our first weekend alone together in two months. My fiancé and I—who had decided to elope and had told everyone, including his kids—were about to set off in search of something modern and fashion-forward (no princessy flounces and lace for me). And then his daughter, who was not scheduled to be with us that weekend, said she'd like to be, after all. My fiancé told her she could without asking me about it. I said the wrong and wicked thing. I admitted, insisted in fact, that I wanted a quiet weekend without his girls. I wanted us to pick out my wedding dress alone, together. My fiancé went silent, obviously unhappy. I went silent, feeling misunderstood, guilty, and then resentful. Was I being unreasonable? I didn't know anymore. When it came to marrying a man with children, I was discovering I couldn't find my footing or trust my judgment much of the time.

It wasn't that I didn't like them, I insisted defensively to my future husband on that day and many others. I did. I looked forward especially to spending time with my older stepdaughter-to-be, the one who didn't live with us, because I wanted to have the opportunity to get to know her in the way I was getting to know her little sister. But in those early days, I found the girls equal parts "adorable and fun to be around" and "exhausting and demanding." Sometimes, even though I didn't want to admit it, I even found them "bratty and difficult." Let me add that this was not their fault, not by a long shot. Getting used to me couldn't have been easy for them. And to make matters worse, I was coming to understand that for the entire six years of my fiancé's separation, divorce, and subsequent single life, he had made sure that weekends were a whirlwind of activities planned with the girls' wants in mind. They were pretty much in charge of all the decisions—where to have lunch, which DVDs to rent, how many glitter pens and henna tattoos and pairs of shoes to buy, when to go to bed. In my future husband's words, "They've come to expect that they can show up whenever they feel like it and that my life is all about them whenever they do."

It was only natural that, during the deepening of my relationship with him and my acquaintanceship with his girls, he and I would not always see eye to eye regarding the fact that I needed a little more time away from them than he did. But it felt like a failure to argue so much—Does the TV have to be that loud? Shouldn't she do her homework? Can't they put their own dishes in the dishwasher? Where was his sense of privacy and of romance, anyway?—and I could sense it pulling us apart. We were in the outer circle of step-hell, though I didn't realize it yet.

I wrote this book about women with stepchildren, for women with stepchildren, because being a woman with stepchildren is not easy. E. Mavis Hetherington, Ph.D., psychologist and author of the landmark, three-decade Virginia Longitudinal Study of 1,400 families that divorced and remarried, notes that whereas children frequently come to appreciate having a stepfather—particularly if he brings in income, provides companionship to Mom, and proves to be a friend to the child—"the situation with stepmothers is more difficult and stepchild resentment is more intense." And this state of affairs is more or less unavoidable. As Hetherington writes, "Even those [women] who would like to be less involved [in running the family] rarely have the chance. They are often expected to be nurturers to already difficult and suspicious children [and] to impose some kind of order on the household, which is angrily and bitterly resented by many stepchildren." Hetherington found "a real demonizing of the stepmother" in situations where the husband did not support his wife's efforts to parent and discipline, and where the husband's ex treated her as a rival and was highly involved in the children's lives and their father's household. Reporting with some surprise that so many of her subjects described their stepmothers as "evil, malevolent, wicked, or monsters" and gave them nicknames like "Dog Face" and "The Dragon," Hetherington concludes, "Stepfathers rarely encountered this level of vitriol." Of course, there are plenty of kids who give their stepfathers a hard time; some ultimately break off relations with Mom's second (or third) spouse altogether. But the stepmonster, it seems, is a uniquely female hybrid. She is easy to hate; she is pervasive in the culture (including our collective unconscious); and we are petrified of becoming her. Often we turn ourselves inside out to avoid it or berate ourselves for having feelings that strike us as "stepmonsterish." It is no shock, then, that several studies find that stepmothers have the most problematic role in the "family" and experience significant adjustment difficulties.

Yet stepfamily life, remarriage with children—whatever you want to call it—has been largely viewed through the prism of its repercussions and emotional effects on the children. Books on the subject tell women how their stepchildren feel, what their stepchildren need and want, and how they can help their stepchildren adjust to and accept their father's remarriage. This is tremendously helpful—it can only improve matters to know where his kids are coming from and to have confirmation that it is all more or less normal. But where, we are likely to wonder at some point, is the stuff about stepmothers and how we feel? That is more difficult to find. And friends, however well-intentioned and sympathetic, aren't always a lot of help either. None of mine had stepkids, for example, and so, like the how-tos I finally picked up when the going got rough, they tended to advise things that felt maddeningly child-centric and unreasonable—even impossible. How, for example, could I possibly be expected to always think about the kids when they weren't mine and their mere presence sometimes seemed enough to tear my relationship apart? How could I not take their behavior personally when they apparently reveled in the discord they caused, from passing along their mother's pointed remarks to dramatically disliking my cooking to hanging up when I answered the phone? How could I become a better stepparent when his girls wouldn't look me in the eye? What got lost in these child-centric exhortations and lists about how to be a better stepmother, it seemed, was any acknowledgment that the experiences and emotions of the woman with stepchildren mattered just as much as anyone else's.

Exploring the issue of how children can threaten and stress a marriage, rather than how a remarriage may affect a child, is a reframing many are likely to find unsettling. As a society, we feel for the children and identify with them, and all for good reason. Children are in fact powerless when it comes to their parents' decision to divorce and remarry. In this most fundamental and urgent matter, they have very little say and a great deal to lose. Once a parent has remarried, however, it's a different world. Remarriage experts Kay Pasley, Ed.D., and Marilyn Ihinger-Tallman, Ph.D., note that stepchildren have incredible power to break the remarriage up. They may intentionally create divisiveness between spouses and siblings and set parent against stepparent. They also may pass along unkind messages or invite interference from members of the other household, creating conflict and tremendous resentment. Stepfamily researchers such as James Bray, Ph.D., of Baylor University emphasize that in stepfamilies, children all too often set the emotional tone for the entire household, while Bray, Hetherington, and Francesca Adler-Baeder, Ph.D., of the National Stepfamily Resource Center, all concur that preadolescent and adolescent children are often the initiators of conflict with stepparents.

Acknowledging the simple fact that stepchildren can and do affect a remarriage, sometimes for the worse—that they are, if you will, actors as well as acted upon—can help us better understand what we might call "stepmother reality," the specific, shared experiences of women with stepchildren. This reality has been largely ignored by feminists, sociologists, and even some of the very authors who write about stepmothers and stepmothering. Why might this be? I believe that we tend to sweep the stepmother's difficulties under the rug because they strike us as unseemly. Her pain, struggles, and failures set us on edge, make us want to turn away, because they smack of guilt. A stepmother's suffering is, more than anything else, an indictment—of her. An admission not so much that she is falling short as that she is flawed. Thinking we understand it, we decide there is nothing more to learn—"Anna's stepmother is awful!" "If the stepmom is nice, everything will be fine; if there are problems, it's because she's not trying hard enough"—and so we are left comprehending very little. Disliking stepmothers is easy; suspecting them is more or less automatic. Caring about stepmothers, expressing concern about what they're going through, considering their reality at any length—all this requires a leap of faith.

Even by women with stepchildren themselves. I set out to better understand women having a hard time with stepmothering because the research amply demonstrates that most stepmothers will have a difficult time, certainly in the earliest phases of stepfamily formation and perhaps intermittently for decades. Only a very few women with stepchildren insist that stepmothering has never been difficult for them. For this minority, stepmothering is simply gratifying.

Research indicates that these women aren't just rare; they're also lucky. Stepmothering is easy and joyful for the few for whom all the determining factors for success—supportive husbands and cooperative exes who are not permissive parents; children free of loyalty conflicts who happen to be at just the right stage of development to accept a stepparent—are felicitously there. But the planets are unlikely to line up just so for the majority of us. So many of the women I interviewed did in fact seem worn-out from their efforts to "do the right thing" and put the kids first. So many were emotionally exhausted from years of biting their tongues and biding their time in a position that could feel thankless, with the tacit understanding that their own feelings mattered less. Most broadly, my aim in this book is to counter that tendency and to put the woman with stepchildren back at the center of her own life. Stepmonster explores who she is and what she does. It asks what she wants and needs, and why. I have tried to approach the topic—one so often sanitized and sugarcoated—with candor and compassion for stepmothers. In a larger sense, I hope to reframe our culture's discussion about stepmothering so that it is finally and truly about the woman married to a man with children and not just the idealized version of her—well-intentioned, patient, fun!—we seem to be increasingly expecting her to be. The less perfect and more human parts of us must be considered, too, if we are to understand who we are and what stepmothering is: the mean thoughts that scare even us; the big, impolite feelings about our stepchildren and our husbands and our role. At times, the issues and emotions that surface in this most overdetermined role can lead us to act in ways we have never acted before—jealous, angry, "vindictive," like the classic stepmonster—and do things we never suspected we were capable of. (I could write an entire chapter on wicked stepmother behavior, starting with the time I got fed up with asking my stepdaughter to clean her room. I could make a million excuses—it was a stressful time, just days after 9/11 and two months after the birth of my son—but the long and short of it is that while she was out, I put all the things she had left on the floor in garbage bags and hurled them toward the front door.) It is time to consider these unattractive, taboo aspects of the stepmothering experience dispassionately, rather than simply denying them or insisting that we rush to rid ourselves of them in order to make ourselves better stepmothers, to improve ourselves in the service of others.

As any seasoned stepmother knows, our own feelings and experiences are just one factor in the equation. What of the feelings that stepmothers inspire in others? Whether they are our husbands, our stepchildren, our own children, friends, acquaintances at a party, or strangers on the street, the convictions of others will inevitably bear on us. These convictions are often passionate and unshakable: "My stepmother is a witch, plain and simple," a surprising number of adults told me. Yet such entrenched beliefs only beg further questions: How old were you when your stepmother came into your life? What kind of adolescent were you? What part might you have played—and might you still be playing—in engineering the current, less-than-perfect relationship the two of you have?

For the past thirty years, we have turned to psychologists for help with stepfamily matters. But stepmothering problems are more than purely emotional or psychological, as the best psychotherapists are well aware. Anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and feminist literary and cultural theory might help us just as much in our quest to understand why having stepchildren can be so difficult. Understanding the history of stepmothering might also help us see that, quite often, the problems we encounter feel bigger than us because they are. In some cases, our stepmothering dilemmas have actually preceded us by thousands of years, and there is likely tremendous relief in this knowledge. Ancient Roman women were sometimes tortured on suspicion of having poisoned their stepsons. Court documents indicate that husbands and wives in the American colonies frequently came to blows over disciplining stepchildren. Suddenly, modern life in a remarriage with kids doesn't feel so novel or anomalous. And figures that others might find deflating, such as the ones I enumerated at the beginning of this introduction, assure us that we are neither alone nor unusual.

We seldom hear that many of the fundamental stepmothering struggles are nobody's fault, and so nobody's particular burden to "fix." But this is what I heard from a number of experts, who told me that economic, social, psychological, and even biological factors have been pitting women and their stepchildren against each other for centuries. And so it should come as no surprise that remarried families usually take many years to jell in spite of our best hopes and efforts. Stepfamily developmental expert Patricia Papernow, Ed.D., estimates that most stepfamilies take anywhere from four to twelve years to come together. In some cases, they never do, and much of the time, no one can be singled out for blame. In the words of anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Steven Josephson, Ph.D., who shared with me a favorite pedagogical analogy among human behavioral ecologists, "Relatedness matters, period. Imagine telling people in the hospital to give birth, 'Just pick any old baby out of the nursery on your way out. They're all the same.' We would consider that bizarre—criminal actually. Because relatedness matters profoundly." In general, our bonds to our biological and adopted children are different—stronger—than those to our stepchildren. Bulwarking psychological insights with evolutionary theory this way might help us put our feelings of frustration in perspective and help us understand that what we are up against is not quite so bewildering, incomprehensible, or unique.

It is time, then, for a radical reconsideration of what we might realistically expect women with stepchildren to feel, think, and accomplish. For example, we cannot always make our husbands' children love or even like us. Sometimes the feeling may be mutual, and it is time to strip away the veil of distorting sentiment about "female nature" and "the inherent openness of children toward all good women" that have thus far compelled and confounded us on this topic. Will we feel shut out, angry, or jealous? Sometimes. Although parts of the wicked stepmother legacy are outrageous, gender-biased distortions, others are, I have come to believe, inescapable, true, and even edifying. University of Oklahoma anthropologist and family expert Kermyt Anderson, Ph.D., explains: "In some cases—like allocation of resources and access to the husband/father—the conflicts of interest between stepkids and stepmothers are ancient, fundamental and very real." Canadian evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly, Ph.D., who has written extensively about stepfamilies, concurs. "Let's face it," he told me, "in many ways stepchildren and stepmothers are rivals." And sometimes we act like it. Is that so surprising, or so tragic? Is it not, perhaps, even normal?

My stepdaughter joined us for our wedding dress excursion. Initially enthused, she eventually became annoyed and impatient, and so did I. After all, picking a wedding dress, even one for an elopement, is a labor-intensive process. At one point, her father bought her something, probably to assuage her sense of being excluded, and she lamented, "She gets a beautiful, expensive dress, and all I get is a cheap belt? How come?"

Maybe because I'm the one getting married? I thought to reply tartly. I didn't, of course. I knew it wasn't my place, and so I waited for her father to say something. And as usual, I waited in vain. I might have been every stepmother just then as it sank in, between dress number four and dress number five, that, dress it up however I wanted to, the simple truth was that the girls sometimes acted entitled and jealous when I was around, and their father, perhaps because he felt guilty for giving them something to act entitled and jealous about, did nothing to put a stop to it. I hated all three of them in that ugly, revelatory moment and wondered whether I should even be getting married. And then came a powerful wave of disbelief and self-loathing. I was becoming what I believed I would never be: a stepmonster! Me. How was this possible? That day was full of drama, resentment, and hostility, much of it engineered—albeit unwittingly—by me. I have made hundreds more mistakes since that day when I fought with my husband, made my stepdaughter feel unwelcome, and was myself pushed aside on an excursion that should have been all about me. No one was precisely in the wrong there; everyone was, in some sense, wronged. It's like that sometimes in a remarriage with children.

But improbably enough, my story does have a happy ending. Nine years later, my husband and I are still going strong. I am typical in that, with the passage of time and the birth of my sons, my life and my heart have been rearranged. Focusing on my marriage, which seemed more consolidated and secure with each passing day, I was able to relax my unrealistic expectations of my stepdaughters, tone down my hopes, and better see and appreciate them for who they are. For their part, my stepdaughters, interesting young women now, are more focused on their own lives and goals than on the drama of where they fit in with us. They are accomplished people and, quite often, lovely company. Many of my subjects and much of the literature describes similar shifts of feelings after the first five years or so of a remarriage with children.

Yet as a great deal of research now indicates, and for a number of reasons explored in the pages that follow, some children and adult children simply never come around to their stepmothers. And in spite of what we read and what we suspect and what we're often told, the drama, difficulty, or simple indifference that is likely to enfold us when we marry a man with kids is not necessarily an indictment or a referendum on our value as people, wives, or stepmothers. This realization can be life altering. I hope that we will learn to stop giving our stepchildren the power to make us "good" by liking us. It only confuses them and sets us all up for a fall. The women with stepchildren who make it with their personalities and self-respect intact, I have learned, are very good at negotiating with their own hopes and adjusting their expectations, and they have learned to simply ignore the opinions of the uninformed. Of course, the need for approval—especially in matters regarding children—runs deep in women, and it is no easy thing to buck. Maybe that's why, once we have gotten to the place of caring a little less about how others view us, once we have decided, on some level, to focus our hopes in directions other than winning his kids over no matter what it takes and put our energies elsewhere, we sometimes refer to ourselves, with knowing smirks, as "stepmonsters." "I hear you're interviewing women for a book called Stepmonster. I definitely am one!" a doctor, mother, and stepmother e-mailed me, and I knew immediately she was not. Over and over, I was struck by the way my subjects looked to themselves for answers about why stepfamily life was often so difficult, rather than focusing on the entire system they were only one part of.

This is not a book about how I learned my lesson or won my stepkids over or became a better person by marrying a man with children. My reality, like that of the women with stepchildren I interviewed, is not nearly so neat or cut-and-dried. This is not a book about how to change yourself or how to act in order to be a better stepmother. I have learned that there is no one recipe for success, no single "right way." Rather, my goal has been to synthesize and distill some of the less readily available studies and insights from experts in a number of disparate fields. This work, generally published in academic and professional journals, might not be easily accessible to the very women who would benefit from it most. I also have sought to suggest a few alternative lenses through which to view stepmothers and stepmothering, and I have drawn on my background in literary and cultural analysis in an attempt to understand the elusive, frightening, and fascinating character who is the stepmother, as well as the force field of social relations, emotions, and cultural associations from which she emerges.

For this project, I interviewed eighteen women with stepchildren, twelve adult stepchildren (six men and six women), and several men with children who had divorced and remarried. I also had more informal conversations with at least a dozen other people. I used the snowball method of recruitment—first interviewing friends and acquaintances married to men with children, who then told me about friends or acquaintances of theirs who also were stepmothers. This is a strategy social scientists frequently use with populations that are wary of "outsiders," an apt description of stepmothers who are having difficulties. Two of my interview subjects were both stepdaughters and stepmothers, bringing a valuable "double vision" to the table. Instead of trying to recruit a representative sample, I spoke to women with stepchildren of all ages and to adult stepchildren in order to bring real voices into the book and hear basic issues framed in human terms. I filled in the gaps by turning to the comprehensive longitudinal studies on stepfamilies conducted by psychologists and social scientists and to interviews with experts on the experiences of women with stepchildren.

All the women I interviewed were asked to answer the same questions. Interestingly, all but one of them wanted to talk longer than the one and a half hours that I had told them the interview would take, and all but one gave expansive and detailed answers to my questions. Many women were anxious to remain anonymous, as they felt that what they were sharing was "controversial," "not pretty," and "brutally honest in a way that might make me look bad." Several told me that this was "like therapy" for them. To protect the privacy of the many women who were so forthcoming and helpful to me, I have changed their names and identifying details.

My interview subjects were largely upper-middle-class white women living in the Tri-State Area (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut). However, many were originally from other parts of the country, lending some regional diversity. I also interviewed subjects currently living in California, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. Because I have a number of friends who work in the mental health field—as psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychiatric nurses—and because a number of them are stepmothers or stepchildren, my interview pool included a fair number of people from these professions. This slant may be helpful because it demonstrates that even the experts struggle with stepfamily realities.

In the end, it was difficult for me to interview the lower-income and minority women who expressed an interest in being part of this project because they had less control of their work schedules, fewer child-care options, and less free time. I ended up speaking to experts and reading research on the stepmother experiences of Latina, African American, and lower-income women. The research of Francesca Adler-Baeder, Susan Stewart, and Margaret Crosbie-Burnett, among others, helped fill this unfortunate but typical gap in my work. Lesbians in partnership with divorced mothers are another under-researched group whose numbers are growing. "Under the radar" might best characterize this family form, but in my informal recruiting, I spoke to several such women. I found that they shared many of the essential stepmother issues outlined in the chapters that follow, with an added dose of role ambiguity and lack of social and institutional acknowledgment and support, making things even more difficult for them. Until more work is done with all these women, our understanding of stepmothering is contingent, and our ability to help women with stepchildren is compromised.

I found a wedding dress that day. It was my husband's idea, really. He said, "Let's go over here and look a little more." I was ready to rush out, feeling defeated and guilty and resentful that his daughter was obviously not enjoying herself, was in fact miserable with our excursion, and so "ruining" what I had hoped would be my special day. But he insisted, and there it was. "It won't fit," the saleswoman tut-tutted, but she was wrong. It was divine, and I loved it. I still wear my knee-length, riotously patterned, colorful Pucci wedding dress occasionally. Every time I put it on, it feels fresh, irreverent, and appropriate all at once. And I remember the day I got married, how perfect it was—the blazing heat, the blue sky, the red rocks in the desert—not just the bickering, the feelings of betrayal, and my unhappy epiphany about how hard it was all going to be. Against the odds, things have worked out better than fine for my husband and me, and for millions of other women as well. I hope that Stepmonster might help readers feel that if someone as impatient and imperfect as I am can survive the most statistically harrowing of all step-situations, there is plenty of hope to go around.