Wednesday Martin

There’s no emotion more taboo for a woman with stepchildren to admit to feeling (let alone actually express) than jealousy. And there’s no more potent stereotype than a green-eyed stepmonster. Who wants to be that ugly cliche? No one. And so we bend over backwards, many of us, and protest too much, insisting that we would never, ever, ever Feel Like That.

But scratch the surface and you will quickly learn that jealousy is an astonishingly common, albeit stigmatized, stepmother experience. Virtually every woman I interviewed in the course of researching my book told me (after a good half hour or so of warming up) that she had felt jealous of her stepchildren’s relationship with their dad at some point. And disgusted with herself for having the feeling. “Daddy loves us the best!” one woman I interviewed reported being told by her twin nine- year-old stepdaughters. She was furious for herself for not being able to just laugh it off–and also upset that her husband said and did nothing when his girls were around to dispel the notion that they did, in fact, count more in the household.

And there’s the rub. Social psychologist and stepmother Elizabeth Church has written extensively on women with stepchildren and jealousy. And her insights may come as a real epiphany. Jealousy is not just common; it is normal, Church notes, and it is also a two way street–stepchildren are frequently quite angry and jealous of stepmom for “taking dad away” (forget about the fact that stepmom probably didn’t–the vast majority of men do not leave their marriages for a woman they have an extramarital affair with. But that’s another post).

In addition, stepmother jealousy isn’t so simple. It is actually an emotional detour of sorts, a kind of sleight-of-hand in which one feeling masks another reality. Jealousy, Church notes, is really powerlessness turned inside out. Find a jealous stepmother and you will also have found a woman who feels utterly shut out, excluded, and disempowered whenever her stepkids are in the picture.

Moreover, Church notes, it’s not just that women with stepchildren FEEL powerless and disregarded in relationships in the stepfamily system–they ARE powerless and disregarded.

In previous posts I’ve considered at length the many ways in which women with stepchildren, far from being power-crazed excluders, are actually fundamentally vulnerable and powerless. But in short, feeling second best; feeling like an outsider in one’s own home; having little or no say in parenting practices and even when and whether the stepkids will visit or move in with you; and feeling like a rival due to interactions between our husbands and their kids are all very typical aspects of stepmother reality. They are also all factors that contribute to a stepmother’s disempowerment and outsider status in the household. “They show up,” one woman with a stepson and stepdaughter in their twenties told me, “and it’s like the baby and I don’t even exist.” She is unpartnered and parenting an infant alone whenever her husband’s kids show up, a difficult and trying situation, and yet if she speaks about it to her husband, or even acknowledges her frustration and resentment to herself, she has become an evil stepmother, the very cliche she has promised herself she will never become.

But jealousy, Church’s research confirms, is NOT a sign of being a wicked, flawed, petty stepmonster. Rather, it’s an indication that there are still power imbalances within the family system. Jealousy is a message to the couple: WARNING, this couple relationship needs to be strengthened! The site of intimacy and decision making needs to be transferred from the father-child dyad to the couple dyad. When women with stepkids feel truly supported and partnered by their husbands or boyfriends, when the couple relationship is the center of the family, when the kids of any age revolve around the couple rather than the couple revolving around and contorting themselves to accommodate his kids, the stepmother’s jealousy will subside.

Tags: Elizabeth Church, jealousy, stepmonster, stepmother, wednesday martin

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under misc, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.