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!
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.
One of the biggest points of confusion and controversy as I talk to people about Stepmonster and stepmother reality is the injunction, “Put the kids first” and “The kids should always come first” and other variations on this theme. It’s become a virtual mantra since Constance Ahrons introduced the idea of “The Good Divorce” and highly cooperative co-parenting after a breakup as ideal for the kids. The members of the ex-couple, Mom and Dad, should put their differences aside, Ahrons urges, for the sake of a more harmonious “bi-nuclear family” or divorced family that spans two households. This will spare the kids from ugly, painful loyalty binds and help with their adjustment to the shattering of family life as they knew it.
Ahrons is right. Numerous studies verify that high levels of conflict between parents pre and post-divorce can be emotionally devastating for kids. And that’s evidence enough that exes who can’t stand each other will do well to turn to Co-Parenting with an Idiot, What to Do When Your Ex Drives You Crazy, and other books that will help them through the minefield of diplomacy and emotional gymanstics it can take to Put Your Kids First.
But it turns out that putting the kids first is not something everyone should be doing. Particularly stepparents. And most especially stepmothers. Sure, their husbands need to carve out time for just the kids when they show up for their time with dad and stepmom. But it turns out that kids generally don’t need or even want the household to revolve around their every whim–it feels uncomfortable for everyone (if they do want the household to run that way, or have gotten used to being in charge, it’s a sign that parenting has been way too permissive, and that it’s time for the tide to change). Putting them “first” in this context merely keeps them in the status as “special visitor” or “little prince/princess,” rather than integrating them into the life of the couple and the stepfamily as true family members. It also builds stepmother resentment if every time his kids show up, she is suddenly shunted into outsider status or asked to cook, clean, and otherwise bend over backwards to accommodate them as her husband lavishes them with attention and refuses to draw the line when they misbehave, reasoning that “my wife has me all week but the kids only see me on the weekend, so she can just put up with it.” The withdrawal of affection that so often accompanies the kids’ stay frequently makes matters even more difficult for the woman with stepkids: many women told me their husbands won’t so much as hold their hands when his kids or even adult kids are in the house, making their visits synonymous with losing out on closeness. And this resentment will only worsen if the kids, as Mavis Hetherington discovered in her Virginia Longitudinal Study, are highly resentful of getting a stepmother, often for many years.
In short, one of the biggest reasons remarriage with kids is so hard on stepmom, experts told me as I researched my book Stepmonster, is that dads who divorce and remarry too often confuse the obligation to keep things civil with an ex for the child’s sake with a duty to put the kid first in the hierarchy of relations in a home forever. Translation: not cutting down your ex in front of your kids is good; letting your kids run your household, be rude to your partner, and even have veto power over your new partner because you feel too guilty to draw the line is bad. “Who’s in charge here?” one woman reported asking her then-fiance as his 12-year-old daughter “jokingly” berated him, called him rude names, and demanded to be waited on instead of getting things herself. “She is!” he replied, as if it were the funniest, most endearing state of affairs ever. Too often, it is in fact the father/child relationship that is given priority post-divorce and even post-remarriage, instead of the husband/wife relationship. How could a woman who becomes a wife not chafe against such a fundamental imbalance when she lives it every day or on every visit?
“His kids should always come first.” If the kids are unenthused about having a stepmother, and/or in a loyalty bind because mom has not given them permission to like stepmom, Wake Forest University sociologist Linda Nielsen notes, it is especially counter-productive for stepmom to siphon energy she would otherwise put into self-care (stepmothering is a notoriously difficult and decentering role) and care for her marriage to attempting to win their love and approval. She would do better to focus on her partnership, her friendships, and her work and hobbies, Nielsen says, rather than handing his kids all the power on a silver platter. Indeed, hard experience has taught many of us that pandering to stepkids who don’t like the fact of you doesn’t get you anywhere except lower on the family totem pole, angrier at your partner, and more disappointed with yourself and your marriage.
There’s much that divorced and remarried fathers can do to make his wife’s life easier. The first step is understanding that these aren’t her kids, they may not be crazy about having her in their lives, and so some adjusting of expectations are in order. Wanting your partner or wife to put your kids first, love them as if they’re her own, and feel as lenient and all-approving toward them as you do, particularly if they are unhappy or ambivalent about having her in their lives and/or have undue amount of power in the home, is a recipe for resentment, misunderstanding, and marital disaster.
Remarriages are much more vulnerable than first marriages–the divorce rate is up to 72%, versus 43% for a first marriage! So it’s imperative that we rid ourselves, as individuals and as a society, of our dearly held but completely misinformed notion that the marriage has to come second when there’s been a divorce with kids, or the kids will be ruined for life. The truth of the matter is that the more we have our remarriages with kids revolve around the kids, the more of an Outsider stepmom becomes, and the harder it becomes for both the marriage and the relationship between stepmom and stepkids to evolve into something, real, meaningful, and reciprocal.
It’s often the case, Dr. Patricia Papernow notes, that the divorced and remarried dad feels loved, nurtured and supported by the very children his wife feels rejected, exhausted, and unappreciated by. The mandate that she and he put his kids first–before their marriage and before her own mental health–seems, in this context, the height of absurdity, if not sadism. His job is to invite his wife or partner to the inside of the family, to take a seat by his side at the head of the family table. The deep love he feels for his kids need not interfere with his ability to extend that invitation. Stepmothers are not supplicants in their own homes. Being loved and cherished, being an equal partner, is our sacred right.
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.
