In my last post I considered just how unrealistic the expectation that women married to men with kids will be able to win those kids over with warmth, kindness, and good intentions alone is.
The second great expectation is just as lopsided and fantastical, and perhaps even harder to disabuse people of, since it seems, on the face of it, so perfectly reasonable. If you are married to or partnered with a man with kids, you have heard it over and over. Perhaps, before your own parternship, you even said it (or at least thought it) yourself of a woman struggling with her stepkids:
“It’s hard for his kids. So DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY when they (fill in the blank: ignore you; disrespect or fail to acknowledge you in your own home; mock you; attempt to “split the stepmother/father team”; pass along nasty messages from their mother; lie to their mother or father about something you have done or said to make you look bad; don’t invite you to their wedding or graduation; exclude you from conversations every visit by focusing entirely on events in the past before you came into the picture, etc.)
Too often when you’re a woman with stepkids of any age, “Don’t take it personally” has morphed from a comforting, “It’s-not-your-fault-and-they’re-mad-at-the-situation-not-at-you” bit of pablum into a more judgmental admonition: “If YOU have any feelings about this, stepmom, keep them to yourself.” It is, in fact, hard for his kids. And for him. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard (harder, in fact; though this isn’t a competition, the research says what it says) for the woman married to or partnered with the man with kids.
Indeed, there is a large body of research–starting with feminist social psychologists in the 60s and 70s, extending to the work of human behavioral ecologists, anthropologists, and sociologists today–demonstrating that women are more social and affiliative, that we place a higher value on successful relationships than men do. That means we are virtually primed, whether by nature, culture, or both, to take it profoundly personally–to become anxious, resentful, and even clinically depressed–when relations with his kids don’t go well. And when relations with his kids split us from him, creating tension, unhappiness, and a sense of failure.
In spite of the fact that women derive so much of our self-esteem from successful relationships–and suffer so intensely when we cannot bring them about–for too long, focusing on the perspective and experiences of the kids, something that has given us a great deal of knowledge, has occluded the entire notion of focusing on the stepmother herself, making it somehow unseemly, the height of bad manners and bad morals, to care about how we ourselves are feeling and adjusting. And so “Don’t take it personally,” every woman with stepchildren who has ever heard it will vouch, can also mean “Don’t tell me about it” or “What you’re going through doesn’t matter. Other people do.” Deviate from this script and you may well be considered a stepmonster, or pathological.
“Don’t take it personally” feels like a profoundly unsympathetic bit of advice because it is. In fact, it is actually an obligation, one more incredibly difficult feat we are supposed to be able to achieve graciously and effortlessly. And we’re judged, often harshly, if we aren’t able to pull off this trick of caring least about ourselves with no complaints.
“Why are you taking it so personally?” one woman reported being asked by her therapist when she talked about her stepson stealing money from her wallet and her husband’s response that she was overreacting. Because it made her feel like less of a person to be treated badly by her husband and her child, is a good guess. The fact that stepfamily dynamics are typically bruising to the stepmother is too often viewed, by experts and our entire society, as “proof” that she should not have any responses to it, and that she is “the problem” if she does.
What does it take, by the way, to not take it personally? A lot. It would be interesting to document how many stress hormones are produced in a single of episode of not taking a stepchild’s hostile acts or pointed dislike of us to heart. Even more interesting would be coming up with a measure for the difficulty of dealing with that hostility and dislike for a protracted period of time, as the literature shows us so many women with stepkids do. Parenting is stressful. Stepparenting is more so. And stepmothering is the most stressful endeavor of all. “To be considered adequate,” stepfamily researcher Lucille Duberman wrote several decades ago, “a stepmother must be extraordinary.”
“Don’t take it personally” is as flippant and insipid as advice to stepmothers gets. It presumes that stepmothering is easy, and that none of the insults are “real,” because it presumes that a stepmother’s feelings and adjustment matter less. Not taking it personally in the normal rough and tumble of steprelations would require the patience of Mother Teresa. But for woman with stepkids, the expectation goes, it’s all in a day’s work.
Rather than “not taking it personally,” we might insist that loyalty binds, hostility, and rejection be put out on the table and examined as a sign that something is wrong in the entire stepfamily system, rather than the stepmother’s head.
