Stepmothers don’t have the best reputation — thanks in no small part to our wicked fairytale counterparts.
And when it comes to being a stepmum, there are no clear rules, very little advice and few good role models.
As a chartered psychologist, I became fascinated by stepfamily dynamics when I moved in with my now-husband, happily hoping to form a family with my two young children and his little boy.
I confess I was shocked to find my new role to be far more difficult than I imagined.
This inspired me to conduct research into the dynamics of blended families and to write a book, How To Be A Happy Stepmum, in a bid to share my observations and findings with other women in my position.
With nearly a third of British households now including stepchildren, we stepmums need all the advice and support we can get!
One concern that frequently crops up is navigating the tricky issue of bonding with your partner’s children.
Get that dynamic wrong and you could be in for a world of pain.
Follow my expert advice, however, and you’ll open the door to wonderfully fulfilling relationships with your partner’s children that will stand the test of time.
TAKING THINGS SLOWLY
Research shows it can take four to seven years for everyone to find their happy place in a blended family — and the children will usually be the last to come around.
You and your partner might have been absolutely sure of your decision to be together from the start, but children will often struggle to understand the feelings between you.
They might be grieving the perceived loss of their previous life or resent the new woman taking their beloved mother’s place. If you go rushing in expecting their full support from the off, you might be waiting a long time.
DON’T EXPECT TO LOVE THEM
It is a common myth that you will automatically love your stepchildren. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but sadly this isn’t the reality.
And don’t expect them to love you, either.
In fact, the best you can hope for is that they like you. Count those little marks of respect and appreciation (“hello” and “thank you”) as a small win.
As you build trust, feelings of mutual love will grow.
DON’T TRY TO BE A ‘SUPER STEP MUM’
If you go overboard with gifts, attention or Stepford Wife-style baking marathons, your efforts are unlikely to be rewarded.
Children expect adults to look after them and rarely show the gratitude step-parents expect.
This can be incredibly demoralising for you, and if you lose heart and stop making any effort at all the children can become very confused by your flip-flopping attentions.
Instead, dial down your efforts and your aspirations.
If the stepchildren are younger, think of yourself as an aunt or godmother figure. If they’re older and you don’t have any parenting experience, think of yourself (initially) as a friend to them.
The last thing any teenager wants is another parent, so try saying: “You have a mum and dad and you have me as well, as an extra person who cares about you.”
Find something to share
Aim to spend a little time with each child individually — just the two of you, without your partner. That might mean watching endless episodes of Dr Who together, taking a regular Saturday morning trip to a coffee shop or making a vegetable patch in the garden.
Creating a regular activity that links you with the child allows you both to gently bond and become at ease with each other.
Children will usually defer to their biological parent but if you are the only adult on hand during these sessions they are likely to be nicer to you, and your relationship should improve.
One bedtime for all
If you’re trying to blend your own children with your partner’s children you must sit down and agree on shared rules and boundaries (bedtimes, control of the TV remote, sitting at the table for meals etc).
There’s nothing more likely to breed resentment than the perception that some are being treated more favourably than others.
DON’T CRITICISE THEIR MOTHER
You might feel jealousy towards the children’s mother, resentful if she doesn’t recognise your involvement or even angry at her perceived failings, but keep all negative feelings to yourself (or between you and your partner).
Quizzing the children about their “other life” can create tension that can put any bond under strain.
They need to feel comfortable, not interrogated. Your job is to provide a safe space where you can grow your relationship with your partner and his children.
SPEND TIME APART
It is understandable to want to throw yourself into family life, but stepfamilies can be stressful to navigate. Try to build some time away to reset your batteries and give yourself back a sense of control.
Just being able to pop out to the gym, grab a coffee with a friend, or sit on your own to read or watch TV can help protect you from becoming overwhelmed.
Without a break, stress levels can mount, leading to resentment that could impact your ability to bond.
It’s the opening line in Anna Karenina, isn’t it, the one about happy families being the same and unhappy ones being unhappy in their own way? Because it’s Tolstoy, and he presumably knew about such things, I’ll let it pass, though it occurs to me that what families are in their own way is weird. Perhaps happy or unhappy, but decidedly weird.
As kids, we assume that our family is the standard, for that’s what we see. After all, we end up talking the way they do, having their social and fiscal ideas, dealing with stress or drink or the law in pretty much the same way they do. So it’s but a little jump to thinking that such behaviour is normal, no matter how peculiar that behaviour might be.
We observe strangeness in other people and in their families. God knows, I saw a fair bit of it when I was a kid. But perhaps because we have so little experience of the world, we don’t register it as weirdness at the time and don’t come to that assessment until we’re older.
Part of the cast during my childhood were my mother’s three aunts, who lived together in a 12-room house not far from our farm. Aunt Trace was a widow, though I never learnt more about her husband than that he had been a pharmacist (this created endless room for speculation as to the cause of his death); Aunt Gert and Aunt Mad had never married. These three women lived in perfect harmony in the house, and by the time I was old enough to visit them they no longer worked – if, in fact, they ever had.
They played cards, specifically bridge. Their days were filled with cards, as were their evenings. They had a circle of women friends with whom they played.
Because they went to church on Sunday, they did not play bridge on Sunday, not unless the church had a bridge evening. And Gert cheated. My mother delighted in telling me about this, since Gert was a pillar of the church. Over the years, she had developed a language of dithering and hesitation that was as clear a signal to her partner as if she had laid her cards face up on the table. “Oh, I think I’ll just risk one heart.” “I wonder if I dare raise that bid to two clubs?”
Since I never played bridge, I can’t decode these messages; it was enough for us to know that she cheated. The stakes were perhaps, after four hours of play, a dollar. But she cheated. She also gave thousands of dollars to charity every year and was wonderfully generous with every member of a large and generally thankless family, but cheat she would.
She gave thousands of dollars to charity every year and was wonderfully generous with every member of a large and thankless family, but cheat she would.
I remember little things about Gert. She always put the flowers in the refrigerator at night so they would last longer; she telephoned and complained to the parents of any child who stepped on her grass; she always wore a hat when leaving the house.
Towards the end of her life, after Mad and Trace had died, she was left alone in the 12-room house and was eventually persuaded to sell it and move to a mere six rooms. She died soon thereafter and left, in the linen closet, the sheets and towels that had been part of her dowry. Beautiful, hand-embroidered linen and all unused. I still have six table napkins.
My brother, three years older than me, also inherited my mother’s chipper stance towards the world, as well as the almost total lack of ambition that has characterised our lives. And he has, to a remarkable degree, what the Italians would call the ability to arrangiarsi, to find a solution, to find a way to get around a problem, to land on his feet.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the story of the dirt. His last job, before he retired, was as manager of a complex of about 100 apartments. His job was to administer contracts and rent payments and to see that the buildings were sufficiently well cared for. At a certain point, the owners decided to convert the buildings to gas heating, and that meant the old oil-burning system had to be removed, as well as the storage tank that lay under one of the parking lots.
The demolition men came and took out the furnace, then dug up the tank and removed it. Whereupon arrived the inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency, declaring that because the tank had sprung a leak sometime in the past and spilled oil into the earth, the dirt that had been piled up around it was both contaminated and sequestered and could not be removed save by paying a special haulage company to take it away.
My brother, long a resident of the town, knew a bit more than the average citizen about the connection between the inspectors and the haulage company because of his hunting buddies, some of whom belonged to an organisation that – hmm, how to express this delicately – worked at some variance to the law. (We’re in New Jersey, Italians, the building trade … get it?) And so he had some suspicions about the actual level of contamination in the dirt.
As fortune would have it, he was about to leave for two weeks’ vacation. And so, the night before he left, he called one of his hunting pals, who just happened to be in the business of supplying landfill to various building projects and just happened to be a member of that same organisation.
My brother explained that he was going to be away for some time and that his friend, whose name he never disclosed to me, was free to come in at any time during the next two weeks and pick up the dirt that surrounded the excavated hole where the tank had been. The only caveat was that the trucks had to be unmarked and had to come at night.
Two weeks later, tanned and fit, he and his wife returned from vacation. As he stepped out of the taxi that had brought them from the airport, he looked about, like a good custodian, at the buildings and grounds that were in his care. Shocked by what he saw, he slapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “My God, they’ve stolen my dirt.” Whereupon he went inside and called the police to report the theft.
The same was to be found on my father’s side of the family, though the suggestion of strangeness was provided by legend rather than witnesses. There was his uncle Raoul, bilingual in Spanish and English, who always answered the phone in heavily accented English and, when he found himself asked for, responded that he was the butler but he would go and enquire “if Meester Leon was libre”.
My father’s Uncle Bill lived in a vast, sprawling mansion about 50 miles north of New York City and often disappeared for short or long periods of time to the various banana republics of South and Central America. The official story was that he was in the coffee trade, so why all those other stories about meeting various heads of state while surrounded by machine-gun-toting guards?
Uncle Bill was married to the painted woman of the family, Aunt Florence, who was not only divorced but Jewish and had married into a Spanish-Irish Catholic family. Further, they had lived together “in sin”, as one said then, before their union was sanctioned by the state, the clergy wanting no part of them.
In the face of these impediments, we were all more than willing to overlook the fact that she bore a frightening resemblance to a horse and was, to boot, significantly less intelligent than one. Her mantra, which she repeated openly whenever we visited, was that a woman must pretend to be stupid so that a man would marry her. My brother and I never saw evidence that she was pretending.
And yes, this comes to me now that I think about them: Henry. Henry was their Japanese cook, a sort of unseen presence who was said to be in the kitchen, though none of us ever laid eyes on him. It is part of family lore that Henry wrote in his will that he left his life savings to the United States. Because no will was found when he died and there was no living relative, he got his wish.
My father’s brother, my uncle, a man of stunning handsomeness in the photos we still have of him, was an officer in the merchant marine. He was rumoured, though neither my brother nor I can recall the source of this rumour, to have been a lover of Isadora Duncan, though I was surely too young to know who she was when I first heard this story.
Being raised under strict religious doctrine can have knock-on effects that impact all parts of life, particularly parenting, says Dr Cathy Kezelman, president of Blue Knot Foundation, an organisation that provides information and support to those suffering complex trauma. “When you’ve been raised within a controlled environment with very little freedom to make your own choices or realise that you can make choices,” she says, “it’s very difficult to develop the strong core sense of self necessary to provide your children with a secure base from which they can explore the world.”
According to Kezelman, healing begins by making sense of what has happened, how it affected you, learning self-compassion and re-evaluating your upbringing through parenting your own children. “Ways to achieve this can include counselling, self-care, meditation, yoga and art therapy. All can help to soothe the nervous system, build a sense of safety and trust and, as a parent, gradually enable your children to develop a sense of security and autonomy.”
Here, three women who have left their religion share their experiences.
“Parenting has been a healing experience” Laura McConnell Conti, 43, was a fifth-generation member of a strict fundamentalist Christian sect. Because she suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, the responsibility of parenting falls on her child’s father.
“From age 12, I helped to raise my siblings. I was the eldest girl and that was what was expected of me because of our religious community’s gendered beliefs. Daily, I had to prepare their clothes, get them ready for school, help them with their homework. On the weekends I had to ensure they attended church events wearing the right dresses and having their hair in the right style. Overall, I had to keep their behaviour in line with our religious beliefs and this left me exhausted.
Wanting something different for my life, I left the church at 19. Once I got an education and a well-paying job, I was able to afford therapy. Subsequently, I spent my late 20s and 30s recovering from complex trauma – a consequence of having to worry about and care for others when I was a child myself.
At first, I didn’t want to have children. I didn’t feel I was maternal like other women seem to be, or that I had the capacity to raise a child without it impacting my health.
Eventually, I met with someone who understood that the only way I could have a child was if he was the primary carer, and I had a son in my late 30s.
I didn’t think my life would change very much, but the reality is that parenting has been a healing experience for my own childhood trauma – although that was not the intention or the expectation.
My parenting style is hands-off. I don’t have the capacity to worry or organise for my son. Difficult things, like going to the doctor or getting vaccinations, I leave to his father. I get to do more of the fun stuff – clothes shopping, hanging out and playing.
When you leave a high-control group, you don’t have a template from which to mirror good parenting. You’re relearning to do things in a very different way and, as a result, I find parenting to be a lonely experience.
And due to the abuses I experienced, I’m hyper-vigilant. This means my son hears and learns about personal safety and consent at a much younger age than most. In turn, during periods when I’m not feeling well, he understands that I can’t be completely present in his life.
I aim to raise a well-rounded human being, who can identify safe people, has the ability to be confident in life and is surrounded by good friends, so he won’t need to fill his voids from such groups.”
“The backlash from the parish was shocking” Mel Welch, 41, was born and raised under strict religious doctrine. When she left the church, she was overprotective of her children. She has since learnt that instilling self-trust is the best way to empower them.
“There were lots of rules and heavy control under the religious group I was raised in. The biggest fear instilled in me was of going to hell. It was deeply ingrained that if I upset anyone or did anything wrong, that would upset God and I would be banished to hell automatically. So I made sure not to upset the pastors or my parents.
I married a pastor’s son when I was 18 and he was 20. Marriage was the only way that being alone together would be allowed by the pastors.
Sadly, my first-born child died at birth. The backlash from the members of the parish was shocking: some said my baby’s death was because we didn’t pray enough. We were consequently given six weeks to get over our grief.
I went on to have four more children and by the time I turned 30, I could no longer keep up with the pressure I was putting on myself to attend weekly church gatherings and Sunday service. Feeling that no matter what I did I would never be enough, one Sunday afternoon in 2012 I sat opposite my husband and said, ‘I’m no longer attending church.’ My body felt nauseous from the anxiety of even hearing me say that and my husband turned white. That goes to show just how much power they had over our lives.
Consequently, I was shunned by the community. Gradually, my husband came to his own realisation and conclusion about the church and followed me six months later.
During this time, I continued to read the Bible on my own. The more I did, the more I started to listen to and trust my intuition about what the teachings meant. This is a new God, I realised. I slowly understood that I wasn’t going to die because I’d left the church. It was all a lie, so I started to wonder what else wasn’t true.
There was definitely a long transition period around figuring out how to raise my kids, because I was relearning so much and essentially becoming an adult myself. Until I was able to discern the lies from the truths, I became overprotective of them, a form of helicopter parenting, especially around any sort of religious ideas or strict ideals.
Over time, I realised that self-trust is necessary to thrive. I’ve taught my children to create a personal relationship with God through reading the Bible on their own, a relationship that’s based on self-awareness and confidence in their own instincts.”
“Marrying outside the church was frowned upon” Susannah Birch, 37, was raised in a church that discouraged her from engaging in “worldly” activities. She is teaching her children how to be independent thinkers.
“One of the main teachings I was raised on is that Christians shouldn’t be ‘worldly’. This meant I wasn’t allowed to read mainstream books – by the time I was 12, I had actually read the Bible twice – watch popular movies or wear ostentatious jewellery or make-up. Sex before marriage was considered a sin. Further, being friends with or marrying anyone from outside the church group was severely frowned upon because they were considered to be ‘evil’.
My parents divorced when I was 13, by which time my family had distanced itself from the church. To my surprise, my father, who maintained more balanced religious beliefs, allowed me to do things considered worldly. I quickly discovered the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that began to change my whole world view. I also read different book genres and that made me question everything I had been taught growing up.
Subsequently, at age 20, I married a non-Christian. And when I had my two children, I intentionally introduced them early on to a wide range of fiction, music and movies so they could have a holistic view of the world.
Prior to becoming a parent, I thought I was over my indoctrination. Yet whenever my children did things the church would consider wrong or ‘sinful’, I was back in that world. I had to take conscious steps to prevent myself from imposing narrow ideas on my children. Today, whenever my children do something wrong, I try to explain to them why it’s wrong, as opposed to the punishments I received growing up, which I was never allowed to question.
My children attend a Catholic school, which I chose due to the quality of education it offers. It doesn’t bother me that they may be exposed to religious teachings, because at home we read and talk about multiple religions and philosophies, including paganism and Buddhism.
I’ve done my best to teach them to see different points of view and choose what they want to follow, after applying critical thinking. If they feel that something is true simply from emotions or peer pressure, I try to encourage them to question why and to think for themselves, not to be swayed by others’ opinions. I also want them to question the world around them and not to sit in self-criticism, as the church I grew up in taught me to do.”
陳旭@perth 