http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200911/what-makes-stepmothering-feminist-issue

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200910/guess-who-has-the-power-in-remarriage-children

All these years later Sally (doing ads for Boniva, a measure of just how long it’s been) has yet to live it down. She was mocked for her outburst, I think, because her triumphal cry sounded needy and self-satisfied at once. We hated her for wanting approval so badly–and for being so pathetically grateful once she got it. Her need and vulnerability made us mean. Her desire for love brought out our contempt. And her expressed satisfaction at having won it made us want to take it away. She gave the academy–and us–all the power. And for that, she earned our disdain.

I’m going somewhere with this, believe it or not. Sally couldn’t help herself. It was part of who she was–insecure–but it was just part and parcel of who she was. Because no one wants and needs love and approval, no one craves it, like women do. At work, at our children’s schools, at the places we volunteer, from out bosses and our underlings, women are constantly seeking approval, building coalitions, seeking consensus, trying to bring about agreement. Trying to be liked.

Our affiliative and relational tendencies work in our favor sometimes–we might use our personal connections to build our profile at the office; friendships can lead to help with childcare, emotional support, and countless other benefits. But just as often, these tendencies are self-defeating. Sometimes they even seem sick. Have you ever gone on one of those crazy websites like www.urbanbaby.com? The amount of hostility between women there is staggering, with exchanges so vicious that even a 20-year-veteran of New York City living like me has to seek cover. But what truly astonishes, upon closer observation, is the attempts to come to agreement, to bring other women to one’s side in the debate about who else on the site is a bitch. Women go on to post a question, it seems, and stay on in spite of heaps of abuse in order to build a bridge and connect–to someone they will likely never meet. Obsessively. For hours at a time. This is how strong the drive to build coalitions and engineer consensus, agreement, and good relationships is among women. So strong that we will do it for hours on end with nasty, perhaps even sociopathic total strangers on a web site!

From a stepmother’s perspective, the culture at large seems to have hooked into our drive to be liked, our need for approval, in sinister ways. For example, stepmother success is currently measured in an absurd way, one that remains mostly unexamined: a good stepmother = a stepmother whose stepkids like her.

This standard is ridiculous because stepmothering is not always, and perhaps not even usually, a two way street: being nice and making an effort ourselves is, it turns out, no guarantee. Indeed, Mavis Hetherinton and Marilyn Coleman and Larry Ganong found that it often backfires in a stepmother’s face, particularly if the kids are in a loyalty bind: the more attractive, appealing, and kind a stepchild in a loyalty bind finds his or her stepmother, the more forcefully he or she will reject her. And loyalty binds don’t just dissolve when kids get older. One woman told Hetherington about how she and her siblings mocked their stepmother behind her back for being nice and upbeat and “sucking up to us.” Presumably, if she were less warm and made less of an effort, they would criticize her for that, too.

Not all stepchildren are unkind to or contemptuous of their stepmothers once they have become adults, of course. And not all situations are so bad. But most stepmothers do struggle at some point, and many do so for years. The anecdote underscores a dynamic that the research on stepfamilies shows to be all to common: adult women acting like supplicants to their partner’s kids.

When will we stop giving his kids all the power–to make us not only good stepmothers but also good women and good people? When will we stop needing to be really, really liked, and bending over backwards to get there? I don’t know, but my prediction is that once we manage it, the balance of power will be reset in our households; our marriages or partnerships will get a shot in the arm; and our resentment of his kids will decrease dramatically.

Anyone reading this, and reading this far, is likely a person who has made an effort with her husband or partner’s kids because she’s decent. There is good reason to try. But there are equally good and important reasons to know when to draw the line. If the options are preserving one’s dignity at the cost of seeming “cold, ” or continuing to give undue amounts of power to someone uninterested or incapable of interpersonal reciprocity for whatever reason, we might consider the wisdom of learning to live with the misperception that we are somehow “wicked,” rather than continuing in a vein that is self-abnegating, self-defeating, and just plain pathetic.

Thankfully we are not all in a position where these are our only choices. But some of us are. Here, then, is a silent, secret mantra for anyone whose need for love and approval from a four year old or a forty year old stuck in a loyalty bind, or just stuck in a rut, is leaving her frustrated and resentful: “You don’t like me. You really, really don’t like me. And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

The reason Joan Kennedy would show up to memorialize her ex was clear–she was there to honor a man she was married to for 25 years. But what was less clear, and captured my imagination, was how Victoria Kennedy might have felt about her being there. Happy? Indifferent? Outraged? This is the range of responses women with stepkids I interviewed for my book Stepmonster described when they discussed interfacing and interacting with their husband’s exes in scenarios as dire or much more ho-hum and everyday than a funeral.

It is only within the last 40 years or so that women in remarriages with children have begun to grapple with a new variable, the presence of an ex-spouse. Previously, most remarriages with children took place after one parent’s death. The presence of a mother and ex-wife in the picture invariably complicates things. As stepfamily researcher Mavis Hetherington has pointed out, stepfamilies, like machines, are subject to the law of moving parts. The more of people there are, the greater the opportunities for interpersonal conflict, differences of opinion, and unreconcilable points of view.

There are exceptions, of course, and much is made of them. With all the media hoopla over the last several years about Bruce and Demi and Ashton (and now Bruce’s wife, Emma) being best pals and spending holidays and vacations and evenings out together, highly cooperative, extremely chummy co-parenting involving all partners has a new, high-gloss visibility. And I found in the course my research that this means another great expectation is dogging women with stepkids: you have failed somehow if he and his ex-wife, and YOU and his ex-wife, aren’t enthusiastically doing holidays, birthday parties and slumber parties together for the kids. It’s what they want and need, after all (it’s not, actually, but more of that later).

This expectation percolates even before the marriage happens many times: I have received many emails from women asking me, “Do I have to invite my husband’s ex to the wedding?” Most of them have no desire to do so, but feel enormous pressure to go ahead and send out the invitation anyway. The pressure comes from the ex herself, the kids, the in-laws and in some cases even the husband-to-be. It also comes from the culture at large: we seem to have collectively bought into the idea that post-divorce and remarriage reality “should” be easy. Indeed, other women told me that they were expected to go to Christmas or Thanksgiving every year at their husband’s ex’s place–and even do so without complaint. “I felt like it was modern and hip to do every holiday over there, but I hated it,” one woman told me. “I put my foot down but it was surprising how many of my friends thought I was being petulant or unreasonable.” Once again I am reminded of pioneering stepfamily researcher Lucille Duberman’s insight way back in 1975: “A stepmother must be extraordinary in order to be seen as merely adequate.”

The “you should include the ex in everything starting with your wedding, make her and your husband friendly, and be friends with her yourself” expectation is so enormous, and so unrealistic, that it bears careful exploration and dissection before we simply discard it. On this charged topic it might be best to let the facts and the research speak for themselves.

1. High conflict divorces are stressful and unhealthy for children. Exes can address this by shooting for civility rather than BFF status. Mavis Hetherington found that the vast majority of exes are doing something called parallel parenting, in which they more or less stay out of each other’s way, and that the vast majority of kids are, to Hetherington’s surprise, doing quite well with this arrangement.

2. Hetherington and stepfamily researcher Francesca Adler-Baeder, who is also coordinator of the National Stepfamily Resource Center, found that highly cooperative and highly friendly co-parenting arrangements between exes were actually confusing for children; Adler-Baeder told me in a conversation that such relationship are as detrimental as high conflict ones, leading children to wonder, “If they all get along so well, why did they divorce, and what’s the point of being married?” Everyone being civil or even kind is great; love and closeness all around between exes and between a wife and and ex-wife is confusing for kids of all ages, numerous experts tell us.

3. Remarriages or repartnerings with children are remarkably vulnerable and have dramatically higher rates of divorce or dissolution than first marriages. Siphoning attention and energy from the partnership into an attempt to “fix” a relationship with the partner’s ex can have disastrous consequences for the couple. So feel free to put your focus on your partnership, not on your partner’s ex.

4. For all kinds of reasons, women are more relational and affiliative than men, deriving our self-esteem from successful relationships and often feeling anxious and even depressed when we cannot engineer them. Keep this in mind when it comes to your parnter’s ex. You do not have to be best friends with this person for co-parenting to work, and it’s not your job to repair what your husband and his ex broke.

5. Keep your eyes open, however, for opportunities to transform civility with his ex into something warmer. Sally told me she was pleasantly surprised when, thirty years after she and her husband divorced and he remarried, she found herself having much in common with her former rival. They now discuss their kids, grandkids, and more. “We’re both mothers-in-law now, and there’s a lot to dish about,” Sally told me recently. My friend Jennifer Newcomb Marine and her ex’s wife Carol Marine wrote a book, No One’s the Bitch, about their own personal journey from mutual disdain to respect and even affection for one another. It’s a good read and a helpful guide, but that does not mean making friendship with his ex your life’s work is a good idea for you. If your husband’s ex exacerbates her kids’ loyalty binds intentionally, for example, or has a personality disorder, your efforts will drain you and perhaps even feed into her sense that you are in the wrong and trying to “make up for it.”

6. Feel free to stay out of the fray completely, and to buck the pressure to work a miracle with his ex, with whom your husband may well be in a conflictual or high-conflict relationship. Never going much beyond saying hello on the phone when she calls is fine, too. Lots of women have no relationship with a husband’s ex beyond that. Why get involved in the logistics, planning, drop-offs and pick-ups and more if it increases opportunities for conflict and your husband can do it himself? A nice hello at the school concert is fine; you don’t have to sit next to each other and go to a diner together after to be a good person, a good wife, or a good stepmother.

Part of succeeding at being a woman with stepchildren is knowing that other people’s expectations (many of them ridiculous, such as, “You’re failing if you aren’t going on vacation with his ex”) need not become your own personal burden.

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.