I have to say I read the whole magazine in a few hours, every month I gobble up all the great articles and do a little soul searching. This month two articles really hit it for me are How and Why to Stop Blaming Yourself for Stepfamily Strife by Wednesday Martin, Ph. D. (the author of the wonderful book Stepmonster) and The Terrible Plight of the Childless Stepmother by Mark Kelly-Williams M.A. Both women are stepmothers and both women have their own children. Mary merged her own family with her husband and Wednesday had a child with her husband, but they both seem to get it. First, Wednesday’s article really hit a cord with me. One point she made was the fact that there might be nothing that the stepmother may be doing or not doing that makes the child reject or dislike her. One part of it is loyalty binds. If mom says it is okay to like and/or (gasp) love the Stepmom then things seem to go a lot easier. The child does not act out to make you the bad guy. All adults act like adults to raise a child. Another part of the struggle is coming into a family with a tween. The child was not at the age where she could accept another adult in her life, which was fine with me. I was the wife, not the Stepmom. I got it; don’t try to parent her except when what she did affected me. I did that, and it ended up reverting to case on, she could not accept it because she was in the bind. Another strike is the fact that hubby was not always a stand up parent; you can’t be when your partner undermines your parenting at every turn. Yes, a lot of it is his fault for not standing up for himself, and it just caused tension and hell for the family afterwards. The child was mad she got called on her crap, why, because dad was never “allowed” to do it before even when it bothered him, but he started when he was a single parent. And guess what, it started BEFORE we married and BEFORE we were a couple. Not to the consistence it happened when we did get married, but it did happen.
As for the other article, it cemented my feelings. In the beginning hubby and the child would do so many things together that they use to do and they were use to doing alone, so I was the one left out. I would be told this was happening and had no voice. If I didn’t want to do it then I got left behind. If I wanted to do something I had to wait. We went to Disneyland together and there was one thing I wanted to do, just one thing. In the 5 days we were there it was the last day and I had a breakdown, as we had done EVERYTHING the child had wanted to do and I kept getting put off. Even the things hubby wanted to do got done, but the both “forgot” about what I wanted to do. Every single time we went to do what I wanted to do the child side tracked her dad into doing something else, since it was close. When I tried to do that she just took off to do what she wanted. It actually took her going off with her friends for me to do what I wanted to do. As Mary says, “While stepparenting is a truly thankless job, I think being a childless Stepmom wins the ‘Most Thankless and Most One-Sided Job Award.’”
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