Wednesday Martin

The expectations that others have of women with stepkids–and that we have of ourselves–are beyond huge, greater than great. They are enormous, outsized, and the root of much evil (or at least the cause of much misery and divorce).

We might think of those stepmothering expectations as hopes woven into judgments tethered to ignorance. Women with stepchildren struggle with misogynist stereotypes (the menu of choices is stepmonster or upbeat, ever-loving stepmartyr who puts herself last); a lack of understanding (combined with a conviction that they know best) from friends, colleagues, and even some so-called “experts” (“All you have to do is be nice!”); and most of all, a pervasive cultural climate of unrealistically high hopes (“The Brady Bunch could do it, so you can too!”; “It’s easy to become a blended family!”; “Subsequent families can and should be just like first families!”). We know from a growing body of research that negative stereotypes about stepmothers have a dramatic impact on how women adjust to remarriage with children. It only makes sense, then, that great expectations, and the “failure” to meet them, will effect our adjustment as well.

Add to the brew the fact that women are highly relational, affiliative, and social, placing high value on how we are perceived, and deriving much of our self esteem from being in successful relations with others, and you see the problem. Between the way our culture works and the way our brains work, it seems, it is going to be a long road for women with stepkids to lower their expectations of themselves. But the payoff–and I invite you to consider it for a moment–would be incredible.

In the spirit of encouraging that change, I’m going to outline, over the next few days, some of the great expectations that keep women in remarriages with kids down.

Great Expectation #1: You’re Going to Win Those Kids Over, No Problem!
The unspoken flipside of this expectation is: When there are problems in the stepfamily, or in the steprelations, the real problem is stepmom. She’s just not loving enough, or kind enough. She’s just not trying hard enough. She’s just not warm. And so on. Recently, a therapist was quoted in a magazine that shall go unnamed, advising women with stepkids, “Remember, the more affection you give to your stepkids, the more you’ll get back.” The fact of someone getting stepmother reality so utterly wrong–an “expert” promulgating, in print, a damaging misconception, was beyond frustrating to me. But it wasn’t a huge surprise, since this particular great expectation of stepmothers is so rampant in our society. Why should psychologists necessarily know better?

And now the facts about this expecation: those in the “If you’re loving they’ll always come around” school don’t understand the dynamics and characteristics of stepfamilies or remarriages with children, those things that set us apart from first families and first marriages. They are, among other things, LOYALTY BINDS, PERMISSIVE PARENTING, and POWER IMBALANCES. LOYALTY BINDS occur when a stepchild of any age (and I’ve seen it in 50-year-olds) has a sense that liking stepmom would just kill mom. In the face of a loyalty bind, progress is a two steps forward, four steps back affair, because your stepchild senses that liking you is an act of enormous betrayal. Every time he or she builds some closeness with you, there is a feeling of shame, and then a need to turn stepmom, who elicited the feeling, into The Bad Object.

Occasionally, adult stepkids are able to shake their loyalty binds over time by themselves, but they are remarkably persistent. More often, stepkids of all ages need explicit permission from mom to like stepmom–and too often, it’s just not forthcoming. Over and over women have told me of pouring their hearts and energies into developing closeness with a stepchild–only to feel frustrated, years later, that these efforts and feelings still go unreciprocated. FACT: You can’t make a child in a loyalty bind love or even consistently like you. And you shouldn’t try. Drs. Marilyn Coleman and Larry Ganong, stepfamily researchers at the University of Missouri actually found that, in the case of a child with loyalty binds, the more attractive, appealing, kind and warm a stepmother was, the more forcefully a child would reject her. If mom won’t release her kids from this hell, find a better focus for your energies than bending over backwards to win the child’s love and approval.

PERMISSIVE PARENTING is a scourge in white, middle and upper-middle class post-divorce families according to a number of experts on divorce and remarriage, including some that I interviewed while researching Stepmonster. The most important thing to know about permissive parenting is that 1) it makes a stepmother’s own standards of neatness and civil behavior seem draconian in comparison to mom and dad’s lax standards (talk about a set up!) and 2) the sense that they are in charge often gives kids in a remarriage the feeling that they have veto power over dad’s girlfriend or even life partner. Do the Forces of Ignorance out there think that kids who see stepmom as a threat to their power and relationship with dad are going to welcome her warmth and attentiveness? Or be open to it? Or that she can, by herself, “fix” this unhealthy family dynamic with kindness? In the context of permissive parenting, these kids will find her threatening, and expecting to get back what she gives will be a draining exercise in futility. Better to take up the issue of discipline with her husband or partner and come to an agreement about how to have a couple-focused versus child-centric household first.

Which brings us to POWER IMBALANCES IN STEPFAMILIES. James Bray has written about the “percolator effect” in remarriages with children–how the mood of the household and the power percolates up from the kids, rather than dripolating down from the parents as it does in a first marriage family. In this unhealthy “percolator effect” developmental setting, kids are getting an unrealistic sense of their centrality in the family and the world–and are unlikely to see stepmom as someone to respect. Then there’s the fact of stepfamily architecture in which the stepparent–and especially the stepmother–is the stuck outsider until/unless she is invited into the inside of the family by her partner. Dr. Mavis Hetherington, in her 30-year Virginia Longitudinal Study found that the kids often like stepmom to stay on the outside, feeling insecure and threatened about letting her in; and that too often, dad tacitly cedes to their wishes out of guilt. Is a stepmom’s love and affection enough to overcome these entrenched power imbalances? Not a chance. Again, hard work with a partner to reset the power dynamics in the household is the only real solution. Until then, pouring on the love is mostly pointless, as it will likely be viewed with suspicion by the kids, and create resentment in her.

Let go of the first great expectation. Remember when you are struggling that, in Patricia Papernow’s words, you are feeling rejected or unloved and unappreciated by the very people your husband feels nourished, loved, and appreciated by. Finding each other across that fundamental divide in your relationship is the first order of business for couples in a remarriage with children. Only then can a good or good enough relationship with his kids develop. Don’t kid yourself, and don’t let the world kid you: good intentions and being nice are not enough.

Next time: Great Expectation #2: Stepparenting is just like parenting.

As a mother, I’ve felt tremendous relief and validation as writers (whether they’re blogging or publishing in traditional print media) have recently blown the lid off the secrets lives and feelings of mommies. They have all my gratitude and respect for letting the cat out of the bag regarding the aspects of motherhood that were not spoken of much until recently. Like how mind-numbingly dull it can be sometimes to keep up your end of a conversation with a five-year-old, how infuriating it is to sunblock a toddler, and how you’re ready for a drink (or at least a massage) by 10 a.m. some days.

Whether it’s It Sucked and Then I Cried, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, or any of the dozens of mommy bloggers telling it like it is, our romanticized and sentimental notions of motherhood have been replaced with a new honesty. We love our kids, but some days motherhood stinks.

When will it be okay for us to write with such brutal honesty about how much it sucks (sometimes) to be a stepmother? Why are mothers allowed to let it out, while women with stepkids are still supposed to keep it zipped? It’s hard to be a mother, sure, but it’s harder, much, much harder, to be a stepmother (I’m not going to cite the half dozen studies that say it’s so. Look them up yourself if you don’t believe me. And those stepmothers reading do believe me…). It’s hypocritical to expect women with stepkids to keep up a wall of silence about it for much longer, while we’re giving mothers the latitude they need and deserve to re-write our social script about what mothering is and what mothers “should” think and feel and do. A stepmother who bitches is considered unseemly, a cliche, not an interesting and important mouthpiece for a cultural shift like the mommies who bitch. This is not a competition, of course. I’m not saying Ayelet Waldman doesn’t have to take a lot of crap. Sure she does. All the mommy writers are putting themselves in the line of fire for telling the truth about how they feel about motherhood some days, and quite often they are berated for it by those who would prefer that that the veil of sentiment that distorts our concept of motherhood remain in place.

But can you imagine if a woman with stepkids dared to be that out there? It’s hard to fathom. And it doesn’t often happen. Women with stepkids are careful, I learned in my research, very, very careful indeed, about telling the truth, about disclosing how much they struggling, about confiding their ugly and taboo (but perfectly normal) feelings, and speaking honestly about less-than-perfect lifetime outcomes with His Kids. That’s why our blogs are so often anonymous or carefully edited, our conversations so hushed, our blood pressure and rates of divorce and substance use so high. We have learned the hard way that when we speak of our stepmothering experiences publicly, we will be excoriated, often viciously, if we are anything less than tactful, diplomatic, and utterly ladylike in our descriptions of life with his kids.

“You sound like a lobotomized Stepford Wife!” a friend, also a woman with stepchildren, chided me after she had watched one of my TV interviews about my book Stepmonster and stepmother reality. She was right. Like most women with stepchildren, in many of my TV appearances and radio interviews I had bent over backwards to seem reasonable, so fearful was I of being branded wicked, bitter, and all the other stepmother cliches. Which I am anyway, many times, in spite of my best efforts. It seems that advocating for women with stepkids at all is profoundly disturbing and unsettling for some tv viewers and radio listeners.

Meanwhile, over the last few months, I have received over a hundred emails from women with stepkids who confide, “I can’t blog about this because I don’t want my husband and his kids to know”; “I’m a stepfamily therapist but I have to tell you…”; “I counsel couples for a living but I’m at my wit’s end about my own remarriage with children”; “As a psychiatrist, I am just starting to accept that it makes no sense for me to make any more efforts with my husband’s young adult son”; and more. During a Canadian call-in radio interview I did last Spring, the host told me, “Something really odd is happening. No one’s calling in, but in the last 10 minutes I’ve received about 50 emails from women saying they want to call in and talk about what stepmothering is like for them–but they’re afraid someone listening will recognized their voice.”

I feel for all these women –who wouldn’t? Everyone lives a partially closeted life in some ways–there are secrets we keep and little polite lies we tell every day because it’s part of the social contract. “Nice to see you.” “Everything’s great, how about you?” But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we relaxed our expectations of women with stepkids, allowing them the freedom to say, privately, publicly, in conversations, in print, what’s really going on with them. Is it possible for us to allow women with stepkids to describe stepmother reality without jumping on them every time they deviate from the Big Lies of stepfamily life–that it’s easy if you just love them, that it’s really worth it, that it necessarily gets better with time. Disliking stepmothers who speak up seems to me the last hold out of a kind of ugly misogyny that has otherwise waned in our culture. And as Elizabeth Church has written, the fear of being branded a stepmonster or a bitch is a tremendously effective gag.