As I researched my book over the last three years, lots of women with older and adult stepchildren shared with me their sense of frustration upon discovering that stepparenting isn’t just suddenly over or easier once the kids turn 18, or 21, or move out of the house. Sometimes, a father’s emotional commitments and financial contributions continue into a stepchild’s thirties and beyond. We’re not talking about caring and spotting someone $20 for cab fare here. Women have told me stories of husbands who unilaterally decide to pay a thirty-something child’s rent for the long haul, or remain embroiled in unhealthy emotional dynamics more suited to a parent and an adolescent.
It’s hard to watch, and frustrating to live this way, women told me over and over. Please, they asked me, set the record straight for all those people who tell me, “He’ll be off to college before you know it, and you’ll be off the hook.” One woman was outraged that a romantic trip she and her husband had long planned for her sixtieth birthday was suddenly cancelled–because her adult stepdaughter (in her thirties) was accepted to business school, and her husband wanted to use the money they had saved for the trip to pay the tuition. It’s easy to share her sense of being wronged, because she was. From their father’s guilt to an adult stepchild’s financial dependence and failure to separate and become independent, to dealing with issues of estate planning and stepgrandchildren and grandchildren, it’s often tough to be a woman with “adult” stepchildren.
That said, in my recent time on stepmother support boards, I’ve been reminded just how much easier life is once visitation, child support, and regular communication with a husband’s ex are all things of the past. The words I’ve read and heard in the last weeks of time in online communities have taken me back to a place I have been happy to forget. The stories about exes who play “chicken” with visitation; or send kids to visit dad and stepmom dressed like the Poor Little Match Girl in the dead of winter; those awful, angry voicemails and infuriating emails and last minute refusals to meet halfway for drop-off; the controlling notes about what the stepkids should do when they’re with you; the critical remarks a stepchild passes along…I would like to conduct a study about high blood pressure among women with stepchildren, but I already know what I’d find.
As someone who has come out on the other side, with two young adult stepdaughters who are high-functioning and on-target developmentally, focusing on their lives and their futures, I wish I had some advice to impart here, other than “it will get better when they’re older, you’ll see.” That’s cold comfort when you’re in the middle of it all. All I can say is, I’m not the forgive and forget type. But I have most certainly forgotten a great deal about what was difficult in the early stages of stepmothering. Thanks to all the women with stepchildren recently reminding me about what we go through. In return, I promise you that you are due, in relatively short order, for a little more peace.
