Wednesday Martin

While researching my book Stepmonster, I interviewed a number of women from all walks of life who described being on the receiving end of aggressive and even violent behavior from teenage and young adult stepchildren. They described not just nasty verbal attacks but shoves, pushes, and in more than one cases, slaps and punches, usually in the context of a “showdown” when the stepmother demanded better treatment or an end to disrespectful behavior, asserting herself as an adult authority in the household. In many instances, the woman’s husband or partner was actually in the home (but not in the room) when her stepchild got physical with her. These women were not describing protracted altercations, and were not in serial heated disputes with stepchildren; nor had anyone who described it to me ever been physically violent with a stepchild or child herself. In short, none of these women had a history of being physically violent or in physically violent relationships. And none of them were “mixing it up” with stepkids on a regular basis in any way or returning the shoves, pushes, and more. These blows came out of the blue, in a charged situation, shocking and humiliating them.

It is shocking to think of being profoundly vulnerable in your own home, but I was not entirely taken aback by this finding, and I suspect many women with stepkids share my sense of understanding, on an intuitive level, how such scenarios might unfold. Indeed, the very facts of stepfamily life suggest that episodic physical violence against stepmothers might be much more common than we think. This is because even those stepfamilies that will end up feeling healthy and normal are frequently, at some point, a breeding ground for the kind of contentious and charged emotions that can erupt physically, combined with a permissive parenting style that may well fail to prevent it. Now add in another all too common reality–a mother who communicates to her kids, explicitly or implicitly, that stepmom should be treated badly–and you have a tinderbox ready, in some cases, to explode. Throw into the mix an angry, resentful teenage or young adult stepchild testing the limits, and it is easy to see how this wire gets tripped.

But how often does it happen? If the emails I have been receiving from women with stepchildren every day since the publication of my book in early May, plus the findings of stepmother authors like Cherie Burns are any indiction, all too often. When we control for the fact that this is the kind of information one wouldn’t not eagerly disclose and may keep secret, the number of incidents I have been told of is very significant.

So then why don’t we hear about it? Why isn’t it in the headlines and on our lips? Why aren’t we talking about it to our counsellors, our husbands, our friends over coffee? Because stepmothers are steeped in a mindset of self-blame and shame with regard to anything that might be perceived as a failure on the stepfamily front. We all know the formula: “If there are problems in the stepfamily, it’s stepmom’s fault. If she were nice to those kids, they’d warm right up to her.” The women I interviewed and who emailed me told me, in many cases, that they hadn’t even told their husbands about the incidents, out of fear of being blamed or accused of exaggerating. They also told me they feared being judged responsible (“You’re the adult. What did you do to make him/her want to hit you?”) by friends, clergy, and even their therapists when it came to the incidents of their stepchildren getting physical with them!

Let’s be clear: physical violence in the household is never okay, and your duty as a stepmother does not ever extend into the territory of feeling or being physically menaced or attacked in your home. We’re not talking about a four year old who lashes out during a tantrum, or a five-year-old who hits on the playground and in the house out of frustration. We’re talking about teens and young adults who should and do know better than to strike an adult. They also know that they can probably get away with it, if stepmom is firmly on the outside of the family structure, if she and dad aren’t a team, if there’s a history of the stepchild being able to manipulate his or her parent, or play parent and stepparent off one another.

Without more research on stepmother families (the three most recent longitudinal studies have focused, as most stepfamily research does, on stepfather families), we will not know the extent of this problem. And that means we can’t help these women with stepkids who lash out physically. Which leads to more stepmaternal burnout and more partnerships and families dissolving.

If you are a woman with stepchildren who has experienced physical violence in your household at the hands of your stepchild or adult stepchild, or know someone who is, I would like to hear from you for research purposes. My email is wednesday@wednesdaymartin.com. I also encourage you to find support so that you can feel and be safe in your home.

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.