The recently announced separation of Greg Norman and Chris Evert, the media suggests, came about because his adult kids–who never liked her–tore the couple apart. What do you think? Please check out my post…and leave a comment!
Please check out my latest post on Psychology Today…
Have you heard about the movie Orphan? And the soon-to-be-released Stepfather? Check out my latest blog post on psychologytoday:
I’m not sure many people noticed the presence of Joan Kennedy at Ted Kennedy’s funeral. But I did. Writing about stepmothering skews your vision sometimes, and brings things into focus that interest only you (and, hopefully, other women with stepchildren).
The reason Joan Kennedy would show up to memorialize her ex was clear–she was there to honor a man she was married to for 25 years. But what was less clear, and captured my imagination, was how Victoria Kennedy might have felt about her being there. Happy? Indifferent? Outraged? This is the range of responses women with stepkids I interviewed for my book Stepmonster described when they discussed interfacing and interacting with their husband’s exes in scenarios as dire or much more ho-hum and everyday than a funeral.
It is only within the last 40 years or so that women in remarriages with children have begun to grapple with a new variable, the presence of an ex-spouse. Previously, most remarriages with children took place after one parent’s death. The presence of a mother and ex-wife in the picture invariably complicates things. As stepfamily researcher Mavis Hetherington has pointed out, stepfamilies, like machines, are subject to the law of moving parts. The more of people there are, the greater the opportunities for interpersonal conflict, differences of opinion, and unreconcilable points of view.
There are exceptions, of course, and much is made of them. With all the media hoopla over the last several years about Bruce and Demi and Ashton (and now Bruce’s wife, Emma) being best pals and spending holidays and vacations and evenings out together, highly cooperative, extremely chummy co-parenting involving all partners has a new, high-gloss visibility. And I found in the course my research that this means another great expectation is dogging women with stepkids: you have failed somehow if he and his ex-wife, and YOU and his ex-wife, aren’t enthusiastically doing holidays, birthday parties and slumber parties together for the kids. It’s what they want and need, after all (it’s not, actually, but more of that later).
This expectation percolates even before the marriage happens many times: I have received many emails from women asking me, “Do I have to invite my husband’s ex to the wedding?” Most of them have no desire to do so, but feel enormous pressure to go ahead and send out the invitation anyway. The pressure comes from the ex herself, the kids, the in-laws and in some cases even the husband-to-be. It also comes from the culture at large: we seem to have collectively bought into the idea that post-divorce and remarriage reality “should” be easy. Indeed, other women told me that they were expected to go to Christmas or Thanksgiving every year at their husband’s ex’s place–and even do so without complaint. “I felt like it was modern and hip to do every holiday over there, but I hated it,” one woman told me. “I put my foot down but it was surprising how many of my friends thought I was being petulant or unreasonable.” Once again I am reminded of pioneering stepfamily researcher Lucille Duberman’s insight way back in 1975: “A stepmother must be extraordinary in order to be seen as merely adequate.”
The “you should include the ex in everything starting with your wedding, make her and your husband friendly, and be friends with her yourself” expectation is so enormous, and so unrealistic, that it bears careful exploration and dissection before we simply discard it. On this charged topic it might be best to let the facts and the research speak for themselves.
1. High conflict divorces are stressful and unhealthy for children. Exes can address this by shooting for civility rather than BFF status. Mavis Hetherington found that the vast majority of exes are doing something called parallel parenting, in which they more or less stay out of each other’s way, and that the vast majority of kids are, to Hetherington’s surprise, doing quite well with this arrangement.
2. Hetherington and stepfamily researcher Francesca Adler-Baeder, who is also coordinator of the National Stepfamily Resource Center, found that highly cooperative and highly friendly co-parenting arrangements between exes were actually confusing for children; Adler-Baeder told me in a conversation that such relationship are as detrimental as high conflict ones, leading children to wonder, “If they all get along so well, why did they divorce, and what’s the point of being married?” Everyone being civil or even kind is great; love and closeness all around between exes and between a wife and and ex-wife is confusing for kids of all ages, numerous experts tell us.
3. Remarriages or repartnerings with children are remarkably vulnerable and have dramatically higher rates of divorce or dissolution than first marriages. Siphoning attention and energy from the partnership into an attempt to “fix” a relationship with the partner’s ex can have disastrous consequences for the couple. So feel free to put your focus on your partnership, not on your partner’s ex.
4. For all kinds of reasons, women are more relational and affiliative than men, deriving our self-esteem from successful relationships and often feeling anxious and even depressed when we cannot engineer them. Keep this in mind when it comes to your parnter’s ex. You do not have to be best friends with this person for co-parenting to work, and it’s not your job to repair what your husband and his ex broke.
5. Keep your eyes open, however, for opportunities to transform civility with his ex into something warmer. Sally told me she was pleasantly surprised when, thirty years after she and her husband divorced and he remarried, she found herself having much in common with her former rival. They now discuss their kids, grandkids, and more. “We’re both mothers-in-law now, and there’s a lot to dish about,” Sally told me recently. My friend Jennifer Newcomb Marine and her ex’s wife Carol Marine wrote a book, No One’s the Bitch, about their own personal journey from mutual disdain to respect and even affection for one another. It’s a good read and a helpful guide, but that does not mean making friendship with his ex your life’s work is a good idea for you. If your husband’s ex exacerbates her kids’ loyalty binds intentionally, for example, or has a personality disorder, your efforts will drain you and perhaps even feed into her sense that you are in the wrong and trying to “make up for it.”
6. Feel free to stay out of the fray completely, and to buck the pressure to work a miracle with his ex, with whom your husband may well be in a conflictual or high-conflict relationship. Never going much beyond saying hello on the phone when she calls is fine, too. Lots of women have no relationship with a husband’s ex beyond that. Why get involved in the logistics, planning, drop-offs and pick-ups and more if it increases opportunities for conflict and your husband can do it himself? A nice hello at the school concert is fine; you don’t have to sit next to each other and go to a diner together after to be a good person, a good wife, or a good stepmother.
Part of succeeding at being a woman with stepchildren is knowing that other people’s expectations (many of them ridiculous, such as, “You’re failing if you aren’t going on vacation with his ex”) need not become your own personal burden.
You didn’t think I was going to ignore this, did you? Soap and Falcon Crest actor Lorenzo Lamas is apparently doing some advance p.r. for his upcoming reality show. And so he has dropped the bomb via Star: his ex-wife, Shauna Sand, allegedly had an affair with his son, A.J., back in 2002, while she was married to him (Lamas, that is). And that’s why he (Lamas) dumped her and why his relationship with his son remains, to this day, strained.
Shauna’s alleged outrage (A.J.’s somehow off the hook…) is not without historical precedent or cultural context. The sexy, seductive stepmother has been eclipsed, in recent decades, by the Wicked Stepmother, but they are closely related, two faces of the same “unmaternal and threatening to the stability and integrity of The Family” coin. We don’t know if Shauna did it or not, but we know that the suspicion that she did, and the fear that all stepmothers might do such a thing, or be capable of it, is nothing new. Euripides fashioned an anti-heroine, Phaedra, in his play Hippolytus, setting loose on the stage a young, bored “new wife” and stepmother who would have her hot stepson–or have him killed. Classics scholar Patricia Watson tells us that Roman stepmothers were often suspected of killing or seducing their stepsons in an attempt to redirect their (the stepson’s) inheritance and redraw the lines of power in the stepfamily. And the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White–would you look at her please? The skin-tight black rubber dress is befitting a dominatrix. And the lipstick is scarlet, in every sense. That lady is s-e-x-y and s-c-a-r-y.
The image of stepmothers as villainous, amoral, and powerful derives from potent fears and strange realities. See for yourself…
Here she goes again, this time on the cover of today’s New York Post as it hawks her Vanity Fair cover and cover story . She may be a Victoria’s Secret undewear model, but she’s also a dreadful cliche when she preens, of her toddler stepson, “he’s 100% mine” and “I already feel like he’s my son, from the first day.” While also claiming, in the same interview, “I respect that he has a mother.”
Really? Then back off with the overreaching, the presumptuous claims to motherhood, and the possessiveness and territoriality that would set anybody who had actually gestated him for 40 difficult weeks (or done all the grueling paperwork, interviews, and obsessive worrying for an adoption), pushed him out (or travelled across the world to get him, or gone through the harrowing process of waiting to see if the birth mother right across town would change her mind), been up all night with him for weeks on end for every-two-hours feedings and sleep training, and endured all the hormonal, emotional heaven and hell that is parenting an infant, into a righteous rage.
“I want him to have a great relationship with his mom, because that’s important…but it’s not like because somebody else delivered him, that’s not my child.” Uh, yes, in fact, it is. Gisele is the stepmom, not the mom. If she wants a good relationship with her stepson, she needs to start the process of minimizing conflict with his mother right now. And that means backing down, reeling it in a bit, not antagonizing in person or in print, and knowing her place. Just ask a stepchild: as I researched my book, dozens of them told me that, as much as they may have liked having an auxiliary, loving, grown-up in their lives, no good ever came of a stepmother pretending to be a mother.
I already said I’m not apologizing for my love of Star magazine. Ok? It has been a valuable research tool, allowing me to keep up with what is supposedly going on between Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and Bruce Willis all these last years. And to thereby track our national obsession with what I will call the Overly Cozy Divorce.
Apparently, Demi, Ashton, and Bruce get on famously. They go out together, all of them, take vacations together, take the kids to sporting events together, and so on. It all looks so fun, so unproblematic, so modern, that people reading and hearing about it might just assume that every divorced couple should be that close. In fact, over the last three years, as I spoke to people about the book I was writing, I was surprised by the frequency of questions like, “But most divorced couples still do stuff together for the kids right?” and “Don’t you think dads who divorce should do holidays with their kids at their exes’ place every year, and just bring the new wife along?” After all, the thinking goes, that’s the best thing for everybody, right? Especially the kids!
Not so fast. When sociologist and divorce and remarriage expert Constance Ahrons came up with the concept of the “Good Divorce” fifteen years ago (The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart), she also suggested a paradigm called the “binuclear family”–a post-divorce family that spans two households. This basically means the divorced parents who live apart communicate with each other so that the kids’ needs are met, and cooperate as a parenting team as much as they can, since parental conflict is so bad for children.
So far, so good. But highly cooperative ex-spouses, bless them if they can pull it off, usually hit a speed bump when one of them–he is likely to do it more quickly than she is–remarries or gets into a serious, live-in re-partnership. Before divorced dads re-partner, a typical pattern, according to women I interviewed, was moms dropping the kids off with Dad not only for times outlined in the separation agreement, but also pretty much whenever they needed or wanted to. After all, divorced dads who are living alone are likely to want to see the kids they’re no longer living with at every chance.
The introduction of a serious girlfriend will surely shake things up. No matter what he has told his partner about wanting time with his kids, and no matter how understanding she is about it, couples would be unhealthy if they didn’t want some time alone. Which is all too often, in my experience as a researcher, viewed as “Dad not having any interest in the kids any more” by an ex-wife. Who might really be stinging not from her kids getting a little less time with Dad, or a schedule that’s more structured, but from the sense that she herself has finally been replaced.
If Dad has been spending holidays with his ex and the kids up until this point and he and his partner decide to discontinue that tradition, there are likely to be fireworks, of course. But I don’t see anything wrong with a couple celebrating holidays together and inviting his kids to join, if they’re not in the mood to continue the wanna-be- Norman Rockwell-esque weirdness with his ex–which is how it is likely to feel for most of us.
Let us not forget the obvious point: people divorce because they can’t get along. Usually, they’ve put years of effort into saving the relationship and just can’t. Do we really expect them to get along any better when one of them repartners after the divorce?
There’s something very warped about our expectation that the only people with the best interests of their kids in mind are those who do everything from home repairs to birthday parties with their ex “for the kids’ sake.” Indeed, Bruce and Demi are statistical anomalies–E. Mavis Hetherington found that less than a quarter of her Virginia Longitudinal Study participants who were exes could make “cooperative parenting” work. The majority of them, like the majority of people in the country, fell into “parallel parenting,” essentially ignoring each other, communicating by email rather than phone and setting their own rules in their own homes for the kids. Hetherinton was surprised to discover that kids actually do well with this arrangement, and are able to assimilate the notion of “this is how it is at dad’s house” and “it’s like this at mom’s house.” It may also be better for stepmom than the constant communication dance: she’s spared unnecessary aggravation and gets more of a say about parenting practices in her own home when exes aren’t constantly in touch.
The real kicker, though, is that a high level of warmth and cooperation between exes is actually not healthy for the kids. In an interview, Francesca Adler-Baeder of the National Stepfamily Resource Center told me about the research on the topic, explaining to me, “When the exes are highly cooperative and chummy, the research shows that this is very confusing for kids, who wonder, ‘So why did they even get divorced?’ and ‘If their marriage didn’t work even though they get along so well, how can any marriage work?’ ”
The all-together-now Turks and Caicos wedding party might have been fun for Bruce, Demi, and Ashton. Maybe even for Bruce’s now-wife. But most of us would rather just send a gift. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
I make no bones about and offer no apologies for my obsession with my weekly fix, Star magazine. My fellow readers may have been drawn by the March 30th edition’s headline that screamed about John Mayer’s alleged intention to publish a tell-all about his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Anniston. Whatever. For me, the reading got worthwhile on page 62, with what I think of as a kind of round-up of round-ups: “Step Stars,” about all the “celebrities who treat their partners’ kids as if they were their own.” Indeed, the copy proclaims, “They’re not bio-babies, but these celebs treat their partners’ kids like their very own flesh and blood.” Followed by pages of photos and quotes attributed to steps like Jenny McCarthy, Katie Holmes, Megan Fox, and Sandra Bullock essentially gushing, “I love them just like they’re my own” over and over.
Who knew a stepchild was the new It bag? And that stepmothers were the new Mothers? No, I don’t think the Star is the heart and the conscience of American culture. And I do think it’s great to see positive relationships taking hold between kids and their stepmothers or stepmother-figures. But it’s revealing and disappointing that a mass publication like this one has bought into and is perpetuating some familiar and pretty misguided notions such as: 1) being a stepparent is easy; 2) having a loving relationship with a stepchild is a simple matter of being kind and good to them, and you get back what you give; and 3) that the standard of success in a stepfamily is loving the kids “just like they’re you’re own.” This, my friends, is apparently what makes you a good person, a good stepmom, a good woman.
But anyone who’s been there without a stylist can tell you it’s not so easy. And here’s betting every false eyelash in Hollywood that all these lovey, perfectly maternal celebs have had their not-so-lovey days with these kids, and have been informed, at least once, “You’re NOT my mom!”
The notion that women especially should love their stepkids like they’re their own–and the presumption that, if they don’t, they are somehow lacking, defective, and fundamentally awful, isn’t new. But people who cherish this notion (some of them without even knowing it) and judge the stepmom, holding her more or less solely responsible when things don’t go perfectly in a stepfamilies, are living in a dream world. “Have you tried just being nice to them?” more than one of us has been asked when things are not going well, as they so frequently and so normally do NOT in stepfamilies. Such bizarre biases–”Just be sweet and they’ll come around!”– have nothing to do with Step Reality, in which stepkids typically feel loyalty conflicts, anger, and resentment about mom or dad repartnering, and try consciously or unconsciously to keep stepmom at arm’s length, sometimes for years.
The littler the kids, the better the chances for an outcome that resembles something like a parental bond, of course. And there are plenty of women who have close and loving relationships with their stepkids of all ages. But let’s not forget the truth that James Bray and other stepfamily experts have exposed: in the initial years, and sometimes even for decades after, conflict and difficulty are the rule rather than the exception in stepfamilies. Even long after their formation, studies show, stepfamilies are less cohesive and close than first families–though that doesn’t mean they can’t be high-functioning and satisfying families as well. What the stepfamilies that succeed have, rather than super-close dynamics and perfectly-synchronized feelings and family rituals is flexibility, respectful behavior between members, and tolerance to spare.
The lesson here is to stop judging stepfamilies by first family standards. And to stop expecting stepmothers to act and feel like mothers. With that burden lifted from our shoulders, we can build something real with his kids.
You knew Catherine Zeta-Jones was an Oscar-winning actress. But what about her side job–carpenter? Or, more specifically, the side job of women with stepchildren the world over: family carpenter. At first glance, a recent story about Catherine and her stepson in the Daily Mail is heart-warming: Catherine helped bring Michael and his wild-child, hard-partying young adult son Cameron back together after years of estrangement, telling him “You are a huge part of this family and you are always welcome” (see the full story as it ran in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/femail/article-1151830/Catherine-Zeta-Jones-hot-girl-Zorro-brought-father-says-Cameron-Douglas.html). He’s grateful for it, and it’s nice to hear a new riff on the old narrative in which stepmothers are wicked excluders, surely.
Less heartening is the relatively new assumption in our culture that stepmothers, since they are women, should be family carpenters of sorts, repairing the house of family dysfunction whose foundation was built long before we came on the scene, building bridges between family members with long-standing resentments, renovating the lives of children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Can it work once it awhile, this effort to Fix It? Yes, rarely. But should it be our calling and our full-time job when we marry or partner with a man with kids? Not necessarily. In fact, there’s a very good argument that, while welcoming his kids can only help, trying to repair rifts and knit everyone into one happy family is likely to backfire.
It goes without saying that stepmothering is a landmine of judgments and “shoulds.” If his kids aren’t happy with the remarriage, it’s because we’re not trying hard enough to make them happy. If they stay away, it’s because we’re excluding them. If they don’t like us, it’s because we’re not nice to them. The list of misapprehensions goes on an on, and shares a common assumption: the stepmother is responsible for the outcome with his kids. If she’s good and patient, they’ll come around.
But anyone who’s been there herself, or read the research (including E. Mavis Hetherington’s three-decade long Virginia Longitudinal Study and Constance Ahron’s two decade-long NIMH-funded study) knows that things are a great deal more complicated than a woman’s good intentions bringing about domestic bliss. For example, Hetherington, Ahrons and others found that, while most children of divorce and remarriage tend to do just fine eventually, and it is the expectation that they are necessarily doomed that is more damaging than the divorce itself, more than twice as many kids of divorce have serious emotional and social problems compared to kids of intact families. And they found that these problems were linked to the high levels of family conflict these kids experienced before their parents divorced. Does the stepmother create the problems? No; the research is clear that they precede her. Now onto the issue of why she feels compelled to fix them.
Ahrons and others found that women with stepchildren spend twice as much time as stepfathers do educating themselves about stepfamily issues. Not to mention trying to sort those problems out and bring everyone together. Researchers have also found that stepfathers report both less involvement and less conflict with their stepchildren–and virtually no guilt about it. Stepmothers, on the other hand, typically make great efforts with children who are likely to resent and reject them, at least intially (and let’s not forget that “intially,” according to stepfamily expert and psychologist Patricia Papernow, can sometimes mean up to twelve years!) And when their efforts to win resentful kids over or create a warm family feeling with them fail, women are more likely to take the failure personally, to blame themselves rather than circumstances. The truth is that kids of divorce and remarriage are more likely to have problems, that they are likely to experience torturous loyalty binds, and that it is more or less normal for them to be rejecting and hostile, at some point, toward “dad’s new wife.”
In the last three years I interviewed a number of women who had exhausted themselves–and unwittingly created huge resentments–by trying to foster rapproachments between their husbands and his kids. They thought they were doing what a woman “should do”; adult stepchildren felt they were overreaching, meddling, or should butt out. Other women had poured years of effort into building a “parenting coalition” with an ex-wife who was simply too resentful to rise above or meet her halfway. And then there were the women who had finally, sometimes after decades of unreciprocated efforts with their stepchildren, decided to withdraw and put their energies elsewhere.
Researchers tell us that one of the most common traps stepmothers fall into is the fantasy that we can repair a broken family or become another mother to kids still hurting from a divorce. While well-intentioned, these endeavors are most likely to set us up for a fall, and create tension all around. Much praise to CZJ and those like her who are welcoming to their husband’s kids, even those with serious problems and alienating personalities. But good intentions are not the same as an obligation to pull off a miracle.
I can’t even remember his name. It’s true that I’m not much of a sports fan, but he seems like the least important player in the game I care about. It’s the women–one married to him, the other the mother of his child–that have me (and perhaps you) interested.
Being a mother skews your vision, heightening and hindering it in all kinds of ways that take you by surprise. So does being a stepmother. My pregnancy progressed along with Bridget Moynahan’s. Her son is a month older than mine–though, it goes without saying, she (a leggy giantess, sort-of-famous for something vaguely Hollywood-related) looked a hell of a lot better than I (a mere mortal who at 5′3 resembles a chickpea while pregnant) did during the whole thing. As her personal drama unfolded, however, it wasn’t just our baby bumps I was comparing. She was tabloid fodder, after all, and so I had practically unfettered access to every development, real and imagined, in the unfolding drama of her personal and interpersonal woes.
How horrible, I would think to myself that sweltering summer, my swollen ankles propped up as I read Us and contemplated what to name my own baby, to be dealing with morning sickness AND a love triangle. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll summarize: Bridget and Tom Brady (right, that’s it) were a couple. Then they broke up. After an interval (or perhaps, some tabloids suggest, before there was any interval to speak of), Tom took up with Gisele Bundchen. Could there be a more formidable romantic rival than the world’s most famous push-up bra and thong model? God is cruel. It didn’t look good for Bridget until, at some point in this timeline, she discovered she was pregnant. And held a press conference about it. For a while, it seemed that Tom and Bridget might reconcile (I cannot have been the only one rooting for this outcome, and am guessing Bridget had the same hopes). Then came rumors that Gisele was pregnant. Quickly dispelled, it seemed, by reported sightings of her downing vodka tonics.
Poor Bridget, I would tsk tsk to myself and I looked at photos of her working out at the gym in her last trimester, or caught a sound byte about her solitary progress toward her due date on ‘E.’ She looked fantastic at her baby shower, but was she lonely? Photos of her on the streets of New York during the latter days of her pregnancy sometimes seemed to catch her looking wistful (and disconcertingly un-pregnant, like someone who had just had a hamburger), which would get me projecting and sympathizing all over again.
How could she possibly handle it? I wondered, fueled by hormones and outrage. Of course I didn’t know the first thing about this woman, and still don’t–maybe she’s a horrible narcissist who pulled the whole stunt for attention? maybe she did it just to drive a wedge between her ex and his supermodel girlfriend?–but it was hard for me (and many of us) to see her as anything other than the wronged party here. When it came to the birth itself, however, I started to see Bridget as a full-on masochist. Or was she a sadist? Tabloids ran stories for weeks about whether Tom would be at the birth, whether Gisele was upset about that prospect, whether the actual event would bring Tom and Bridget together again. And then came the stories, after the birth of the baby, that Bridget was hurt that Tom hadn’t stuck around for long after the delivery to get to know the baby, opting instead to jet back off to Gisele.
There had been a constant hum about how Bridget wanted Tom involved in the baby’s life, to be an active and involved father. Why would anyone want that when the world is full of perfectly good father figures who haven’t refused to reconcile after impregnating and then breaking up with you? We’ll never know. But Bridget’s desire to have daddy in the picture meant that eventually, something else also came into focus: the inevitable photos of Gisele, radiant, cradling baby John in her arms as if he were her own. Gisele and Tom in the park with John, looking relaxed and happy and comfortable with a stroller between them. Tom and Gisele walking to the car, with John propped on her hip, looking cozy and secure.
And then most recently, Tom and Giselle walking out of a Santa Monica church after being married, with John, now eighteen months old, once again in Gisele’s arms. “The pair spent their first night as newlyweds with John!” Us trumpeted, and there was speculation that the two married in the quickie-California ceremony because they feared Bridget would not let the baby travel to Brazil with them (so unreasonable!)
As someone who has studied families for the last three years, focusing on breakups and re-partnerings with children, my professional response has been keen interest in how all this is going to play out, and whether we might learn anything from it. And then there’s my response as a mother: I want to rip Gisele’s hair out. Gisele’s camp says she loves the kid like he’s her own. Bridget’s people say Gisele cuddles baby opportunistically, whenever the cameras are around, to spite her guy’s ex, in the same way she chose to get married in his ex’s church. Does Gisele, I find myself wondering, as if personally aggrieved, have to rub it in the way she does?
For the nine years I’ve been a woman with stepchildren and the three years I’ve spent writing my book, I have seen the world through the eyes of a woman who partners with a man who has kids from a previous relationship. For a lot of reasons, it’s not easy being a stepmother or stepmother-figure, and the hostility of ex-wives was something women with stepkids told me about in almost every interview I conducted. Given my personal and professional experience, it’s been easy for me to understand how much it hurts to be set up for failure by a woman who wants to keep you at arm’s length from her children. And to think that woman is simply nuts. “Just stay away,” our husbands’ exes seem to say, and frequently actually do. What stepmothers most often wonder is, Why? “He was divorced for ten years before I even went on a date with him,” one woman told me, shaking her head, “but from the way his ex treats me, you’d think I’d broken up a perfectly happy marriage and destroyed the world’s most ideal family.”
What this particular celebrity drama has made real and remarkably visceral for me, for the first time, is the very primitive vulnerability and fear–and this is separate from sexual jealousy, which we commonly assume is motivating an ex-wife–that a mother must feel when her ex re-partners. Forget about what made her decide to go through with the pregnancy, whether her motivations were pathological or underhanded. Forget about why anyone would want to have the baby’s father involved if it meant being part of a triangle. The idea of going half-sies with one’s child is profoundly disturbing when that child is a baby. And apparently, from the way our partners’ exes act, when that child is no longer a baby as well.
When I think of my seventeen-month-old and what it would be like to have to hand him over to my husband (in this scenario, my ex) and his new, bionic, uber-babe of an underwear-model girlfriend, I feel off-kilter and sick. When I entertain the hypothetical scenario of needing to pump milk for the six-month old he was so he could spend the weekend with daddy and Her, away from me, I want to issue a primal scream.
So I’m going to write a thank you note to Gisele, for helping me finally, truly understand one of the most important aspects of my research, something that was heretofore a mere abstraction for me. And then I’m going to tear her hair out.
