Wednesday Martin

For any Canadian blog followers and FB fans, please tune in to your local CBC radio station tomorrow a.m. to hear me talk about the state of marriage in 2010, which will be running on numerous CBC morning shows nationally ! And call your local CBC station if you’d like them to air the interview.

I’ll be discussing how too often we fail to understand that real marriages between real people are tied to Marriage the social institution. When it becomes less relevant and necessary, we need extra help.

Read the article “Is Marriage Necessary?” here.

I’ve been wondering, How are we to understand the Canadian fascination with all things stepfamily-related? From their ground-breaking research to their break-out artists like Karen Piovaty (featured below on my blog) to their insatiable media interest in all step-topics, you have to wonder, Is it something in the water? I don’t know. But it’s working for this woman with stepchildren: Canada has been very, very good to me. A review of Stepmonster recently ran in 18 Canadian newspapers on the same day, and just a while later, the CBC did a second interview with me, this one for their radio show, Definitely Not the Opera, for which the theme was “An Inside Look at Outsiders.”

The CBC radio show features stories of a number of people talking about their lives and experiences as outsiders. Taking a very different approach to the stepmothering topic–DNTO set my first-person story to music. I think it’s a story many women with stepkids can relate to, so here’s the link for those who want to check it out (my story is about 3/4 of the way through the program, but all the stories are pretty interesting so you might want to listen to the whole thing…)
http://podcast.com/show/2688/

Over the holiday, while you were grilling hotdogs and eating potato salad, I was doing interviews with Fox News, the BBC Newshour/NPR, and the CBC. I’ll post the links to the BBC and CBC interviews shortly (I am frequently stymied, it seems, by technological issues. But not for long!)

I’m noticing that there is great interest among the media in the idea that stepmothers really have the least control of anyone over how things go in the stepfamily. And that they have the least power in the stepfamily as well. It’s just a reminder that the stepmother reality we take for granted–that our husband and his ex have the main hand in determining how things go between us and their kids; that we are frequently treated as outsiders and interlopers in our own homes, and must struggle to find our footing in the family; that kids resent getting a stepmother much more than they resent getting a stepfather; that it’s not over when they turn 18 and/or move out of the house; that stepmothers tend to bend over backwards in order NOT to seem wicked, priming us for exhaustion, anxiety, and clinical depression at astronomical rates–is a mysterious, uncharted continent to those on the outside.

Please, more research and more accurate media coverage now, so we can close the gap between the perception of who stepmothers are, and stepmother reality.

Click here to download the BBC News Hour interview

http://www.cbc.ca/thepoint/MT/2009/05/may_25_curfews_local_marketing.htmlClick here for the CBC interview. Stepmonster interview is on Part 2, beginning at 13:30