The Delicate Art of Stepmothering

A Stepmothers' Day toast to the world's least visible parents

A few weeks ago, I picked my younger stepdaughter, E, up from school on a Monday. She climbed into my truck, and pulled out a thick hardcover copy of the Brothers Grimm Fairytales, a book I had given her for Christmas a few years before.

“Did you bring that into school for something?” I asked, curious.

“No,” she said. “I’m just reading it.”

She turned the page to a new story, looked up and giggled.

“Another evil stepmother!” she said cheerily.

We’ve spoken often in our house about the iconic role of the evil stepmother. While Lady Tremaine (à la Cinderella) is the most famous, there is no shortage of them throughout the Grimm cannon.

And it’s not hard to imagine why. In ye olden days, marriage was a practical matter. A widower would benefit from a lady to run their household, and a widow would be on the lookout for a man, too. In the mind of the man’s children, she’d have to fill the shoes of a dreamboat mom, a role in which she would surely disappoint, which would in turn breed resentment and an overbearing insistence that her stepdaughters help out around the house.

Later that same evening, my older stepdaughter, G, would spike a fever. Though I am not a clinician, I have 39 years of exposure to diagnostic medicine—I know a pneumonia lung when I hear one. Her school play performance was only four days away, and I knew we were on the clock to get her an antibiotic prescription in time for her to return to school by Wednesday, in time for her dress rehearsal. My husband was out of town for a work obligation, so I loaded G and my three-year-old into the truck to head to the doctor. With the blessing of pediatric after-hours urgent care, we didn’t have to brave the emergency room, but I knew I’d still run into trouble as a non-custodial parent.

“But you’re one of my guardians,” G said, a little confused.

“I know,” I replied. “And I appreciate that you see me that way. But technically your parents have to give written permission for me to supervise your medical care.”

As soon as we had checked into the doctor’s office, the PA flagged that I wasn’t listed in her file. I quickly called her mother, explained the situation, and passed the phone to the PA. She got the authorization she needed, handed the phone back to me, I thanked G’s mom, and hung up.

“You’re doing a good job,” the PA said with a nod. “The whole, blended family thing…”

“Thanks,” I said, nodding. “We’re doing our best.”

A relationship with a stepparent is such a hard dynamic to explain, the bizarre mix of mild resentment mixed with appreciation for a person who both disrupts and enriches your life in profound ways. My stepmother entered my life when I was three years old. My mother, furious over the infidelity that had ended her marriage, fought hard for sole custody, so I saw my dad only one weekend a month, every other major holiday, and a month each summer.

A stepparent has no legal or relational responsibility for you. They need not even divorce you to leave you. When my stepmother finally divorced my father after 25 years of marriage, she didn’t even send me a text or call to let me know. No note of apology or regret. Just silence. And yet her departure followed a large majority of my life in which she had, for better and worse, been a formative, ever-present figure.

My stepmother was independently wealthy and displayed the casual generosity and penny pinching that is so typical of rich people. While she often spent money freely on her own whims, she could at times be self-centered and miserly about spending money on others.

When I was 11, she took me and my half-brother, who was two, to England for my first trip abroad, though my coming along also meant I could babysit my brother. A year later, she introduced me to yoga, and ten years after that, she sponsored my yoga teacher training as a college graduation gift. Before my brother was born, she more consistently treated me like her own child, but after his birth, her attitude shifted; when I was young—maybe 13—she told me she had to keep her grandmother’s family jewels for him, so he could “keep them in the family.”

Growing up, it was easy to paint my stepmother into the traditional trope of the evil stepmother, though as a young adult, I came to hold a deeper appreciation for the ways she’d positively influenced my life even as she had also caused me great emotional anguish.

It was only when I became a stepmother that I came to more fully appreciate the challenges of the job. A child has already spent thousands of hours learning to love and trust their biological parents when a stepparent enters the scene. Often, that new stepparent changes a biological parent’s availability, whether as a bedtime snuggle partner or a general playmate and companion. Now, there is a new person to learn to relate to, one who is ever present in their home.

Unlike my stepmother who only had to contend with my presence less than 60 days a year, my husband shares full custody with his ex-wife. His daughters go to sleep and wake up in our house at least three nights a week every week of the year.

One great double-edged sword of divorce is the duplication of everything. A child now has two homes, two bedrooms, and two parallel lives. The upside is often two Christmases and two birthdays—more presents—but it also results in the uneasy comparison between households. (In my mother’s house, money was always a problem, and she openly resented her (accurate) impression that money at my dad’s house was no issue.) There’s also a persistent FOMO—because my stepdaughters only get each of their parents half the time, they seem to constantly wish for more time with their parents.

Because I entered their lives when they were quite young, I’ve already earned the right to be a relational fixture they take for granted. But because I missed the first 2,000+ days of their lives, and didn’t feed them with my body or wipe their poopy butts, I’ve got to earn every ounce of love I get from them.

Any child will rarely say thank you for the range of services parents provide for their kids—meal preparation, chauffeuring to/from activities, family vacations, school tuition—but they will reward their biological parents with impromptu displays of affection that offer a dopamine reward for hard labor. (Every time I walk into the house, my three-year-old runs at me with open arms yelling “Mommmyyy!!”) Stepkids will still take those parental services from a stepparent but without the urge to offer physical affection in return. Every so often, something I’ve done—some act of forethought—earns me a “Thank you, Alicia!” and I try to feel satisfied with their explicit gratitude.

Being a stepmother can be a particularly daunting challenge. While my stepmother could afford to have housekeepers keep her home beautiful, average people like the rest of us are in a constant struggle to keep the chaos at bay. I struggle to maintain a tidy house, without the authority to order my stepchildren to help. I am constantly making chore lists and asking nicely for my stepdaughters to help with whatever chore needs doing, and I feel them groan when I have to ask them twice.

While I don’t have any direct power to decide my stepdaughters’ futures, I use the tools of parental diplomacy as deftly as I can. I suggest Waldorf education and introduce my older stepdaughter to an art camp our family can barely afford, which will hopefully change her life. I summon the patience to try to teach my younger stepdaughter everything I know about sewing because she loves textile arts, even though she lacks the discipline for effective project planning. I urge their father to get them both passports, and, like my stepmother, I get to be the first to take them abroad, first to Canada and then on Camino in Spain.

They ask me questions about the world and the mysteries it contains and they know they can count on me for thoughtful answers to probing questions—about elections and democracy, Catholicism and Christianity, and any number of places I’ve been that they hope to one day visit. I strive to be a superlative example of a curious, knowledgeable, and worldly woman.

This morning, our family sat around the dining table enjoying the pancakes I’d made for breakfast when my husband suddenly remembered it was Stepmothers’ Day.

I smiled. “The perfect day to make pancakes for everyone,” I said, slyly.

“That’s because you’re an awesome stepmom,” G said, coming to her father’s rescue.

I blushed, and nodded.

I hope they will remember the role I played in their lives more positively than I remember my own stepmother, and that when they’re older, they’ll appreciate the expanding effect I had on their experience of the world. And while I hope that my marriage to their father is the kind of happily-ever-after that will last longer than 25 years, there’s no telling how they’ll feel about me when they’re older. However they remember it, I know I will have changed their lives, hopefully for the better.