#stepparenting

Coming into someone’s life to not only love them but love the children they bring with them as well. There’s something about good stepparents being understanding about how a kid might process them becoming a new figure in their lives. How “I never want to replace your parent, but I’m always here for you” can mean a whole lot.

I want more stories with good stepparents in them, or stories about people going into relationships and becoming stepparents. How they don’t go through the process of raising a baby, but coming into a kids life midway and learning how to bond with this kid you have no other connection with.

Their mother had a slightly different approach. She decided what religion the kids were to practice at any given point in time, based on her current beliefs. I believe her current “church family” is the church directly across the street from her massage parlor, and she frequently “gifts” massages when charity baskets are being gathered, mainly as free advertisement for her business. Convenient, right? Let me assure you - there is not a charitable bone in her body. She does NOTHING that doesn’t benefit her in some way.

But I digress. My favorite memory of the battle between good and evil happened circa 2012, when people were getting a little weird over the Mayan calendar apparently “coming to an end”. This fruitcake began getting tied up in all the online hoopla, and decided they were going to battle the coming apocalypse by a) getting their chakras aligned, b) becoming doomsday preppers, and c) spouting her nouveau-cosmic batshit crazy beliefs to other batshit crazies. They started keeping legit farm animals in their 1/4 acre yard. She tried raising quails first, and made the girls spend their savings on the birds, which they (being children under age 10) were completely responsible for. She tried selling the eggs to podunk people for (I’m sure) an elevated price, which of course didn’t work, because small town hicks can get good ole chicken eggs for much cheaper. When that fell through, she got rid of the quails and tried telling the girls they owed her money for the birds. Then she tried chickens, but not normal yard chickens - special breeds which again flopped. They got a goat, which died after it ate dog food and bloated it’s stomach. Again, all these farm animals were the “responsibility” of the kids, because why else have kids other than to exploit them monetarily?

But my absolute favorite is when she got caught up in a New Age cult and started bringing the kids along. They had their chakras read, which the eight year old didn’t understand, so she explained it as “they were looking at my colors”. It took a while to translate - we were trying to figure out why a church was so interested in a child’s crayons. They were made to meditate, which wasn’t fully explained to the kids, so when I asked the oldest what she would meditate on, her reply was “the floor”. Still one of my favorite responses, ever. I laughed for days about that. And one of the cuckoos at her “church” fancied herself a therapist, who was going to “work with the girls” on getting along, made them drink some blessed water from the same jug, which was supposedly going to fix all their problems. Having grown up Catholic, the irony was not lost on me, I assure you.

Recently things have been pretty tough in stepmama world. My husband and I are going for full custody and there has been stress on the kids. This post isn't meant to bash their mother, no matter how lowly I think of her, this is my reflection on my parenting.

For Attie, I am home. I have raised and attached to him from birth. Attaching to him was easy. He needed to eat from my body, his cries triggered stress hormones, his smell triggered love hormones, he needed to be held and snuggled. It was effortless. He's another story.

When I met my step kids (ie. my big kids) and knew my husband and I had a future together I knew I had to attach to these children I was already beginning to love. I worked hard but they made it easy. I responded to them, gave them my presence and intentional time, I provided for them, snuggled them, kissed boo-boos, tucked them in, and cooked them healthy meals. I never set out to replace their birth mother, but in our home, I was mom. They quickly felt the same. They came to me, they told me they loved me, they began to call me mom, they asked me to stay forever, they knew their needs were met with me, they saw a happy and healthy marriage modeled for them and they felt safe.

Without too much information or bashing, the opposite was true of their birth mother with whom they spend half their time. Instead of safety, they felt fear. Instead of attention, they were neglected or rejected. Instead of their needs being met, they were left unfulfilled. I'm not saying their mother doesn't love them, but the kids encounter serious issues with safety, need fulfillment, and love.

Because of how attached I feel to my big kids I can sometimes find myself upset when they choose their mom. Of course, I get it. She's mom and always will be, I've come to terms with that. However, it still hurts to be called mom at home or out alone with the kids and completely ignored when their mother is in the same space as us.

By Amy Dickinson

May 10, 2017

First, a confession: Stepmothers don’t like Mother’s Day. Some non-stepmothers also don’t like Mother’s Day, but I reckon that all stepmothers privately face the day with dread.

Mother’s Day is the annual day of reckoning, when children in blended families get anxiety rashes from trying to figure out how to celebrate all of their mothers, and stepmothers try to prepare for the moment when they will be reminded of their legendary status as fairy-tale villains and the not quite “real” mothers to the children in their lives.

I have been a stepmother to four daughters for nine years. My Cinderella back story goes like this: After raising my daughter, Emily, as a single mother for the entirety of her childhood, I moved back to my hometown of Freeville, New York when she went to college. Deep in my own middle age, my parenting days were decidedly over. But then I reconnected with Bruno, a hometown guy I had known since childhood (we grew up on neighboring dairy farms). Bruno was the very involved single father of four adolescent daughters, three of which lived with him full time. (His oldest, like mine, had just started college.)

Bruno and I fell instantly and madly in love. Ours was a passionate, lovely and crazy high school love. It was fairy-tale love, Hallmark Channel love. A lively, lumpy, middle-aged wonderment. Less than a year after our first date, Bruno and I got married. I moved into his household, and I became a full-time stepmother to three daughters I didn’t know all that well.

By every conceivable metric, being a stepparent is the most challenging form of parenting there is. And yet, stepparenting is seldom openly discussed. Honestly, it is a relationship so loaded, complicated — and sometimes fraught — that it can’t be described in any one way, except to say that it is... hard.

The stepparent relationship may be born through love between two adults, but to be a stepparent is to step into a family system that has already seen pain, dislocation and, at its toughest, abandonment and trauma. For me, being a stepmother has involved near constant calibration, adjustment, many moments of white-hot frustration, and other moments that feel real and triumphant.

Because I am a professional advice-giver (I write the syndicated advice column “Ask Amy”), I’ve decided to celebrate this Mother’s Day by dedicating the day to stepmothers, and by passing along some of the lessons I’ve learned over my years of being a stepmother.

1. Marry the right person. To be a truly successful stepparent, you need to be in a strong and functioning marriage, ideally with someone who was a good and dedicated parent before you came along. Stepparenting will test a marriage more than any other family relationship. Partners need to be able to communicate well through the good (but especially through the tough) times.

2. Befriend your stepchildren. Being a “friend” to your children may fly in the face of some parenting wisdom, but true friendship involves patience, respect, understanding, honesty, listening, affection and forgiveness. Treat your stepchildren the way you would treat someone whom you are trying to befriend: i.e., be the best version of yourself. Understand that your stepchildren are as afraid of the evil stepmother trope as you are of becoming one.

3. The primary parent should remain the primary parent. My husband had been alone with his daughters for almost five years when we got married. He seemed to want an instant blending when I moved into the household. He wanted me to act like a mother and for the children to treat me like a mother. My own instinct was to take the first year simply getting to know one another. I let the kids see my antic attempts to put dinner on the table; I exposed my goofy side, my accident-prone and slapstick side. I let them see that I don’t always know what I’m doing. I let them guide me and show me how their household worked. I took them places. I met (and liked) their friends. I listened to them when they wanted to talk. Sometimes, we just shared space, circling one another but not quite intersecting.

4. Give yourself time. Be patient with your stepchildren. And be patient with yourself. As a stepparent, your humanity and frailty is often on display. The same goes for your kids. Be patient and forgiving. Sometimes I self-medicated through my frustration with donuts, wine or solitary walks in the woods. That helped.

5. Do not punish. I never, ever disciplined my stepdaughters (that was their father’s job). If they approached me with a tough request that I didn’t want to grant, or if they behaved in a way I knew needed correction, I answered, “Well, let’s talk to your father and see what he thinks.” If I didn’t like something, I tried to be honest about it. But I resisted the impulse to act. It’s almost always best to wait, even when you know you’re being tested. You can always act later. It’s much harder to reverse the impact of your words or actions after the fact.

6. Do your work. It is important for stepparents to have useful and fulfilling work, interests and relationships outside the family circle. It is vital for children to see their stepparent as a functioning adult, with outside interests. This takes the pressure off of the children — and the stepparent.

7. Honor the child’s relationships. One of the biggest challenges of being a stepmother is the sure knowledge that you are building a relationship with children who were not born to you. This becomes especially potent and poignant once you develop a closer relationship to your stepchildren — it can be genuinely painful to even acknowledge that they’re not always “yours.” Early on, I told my stepdaughters, “I want to give you what you want to have.” I encouraged their relationship with their mother.

8. Hold hands with your partner. My husband and I faced challenges during the first five years of marriage that I thought would break us, including illnesses, tragic deaths in the family, extreme job stress and the births of two grandchildren to one of our daughters. (The first child was born during our first year of marriage, while my stepdaughter was in high school.) The wisest thing Bruno and I have done is to place our relationship, and our marriage, at the center of our family’s life. Of course, as parents we often put our children’s needs first, but our marriage remains central to the entire family. Our kids know that we are together and that we make all major decisions as a team. We keep our disagreements and conflict regarding our children off-stage.

9. Refer to all of your children as “our children.” It’s important for all of your kids to be all of your kids. For me, blending our family has taken years. We’ve faced challenges and triumphs together. Sometimes, our daughters will cut through the logjam of introducing us as “This is my father and stepmother,” and will simply say, “These are my parents.”

That’s the only Mother’s Day bouquet I need.