Stepwhat?

I thought I had done a pretty good job—no, actually a great one—explaining what a stepparent was to my biological children. Their much older siblings, K & Q, are technically “half brothers” and so it’s come up more than once. 

Then one day my six-year-old Aria followed me into the kitchen with a semi-urgent look, reflecting her anguished relationship with our food choices. Subtext: There is a very specific snack I want now, but I will make you deduce which it is by saying no to a series of things I usually like.

So, as one does, I avoided eye contact and busied myself with something simple: cutting broccoli to roast.  That is, pre-cut broccoli in a bag, because, as the literature shows, we stepmothers can’t be counted on for much culinary effort beyond coating apples with poisons. 

“Mommy?” She said, with earnestness stereotypical of children. “Are you K & Q’s stepmother…because their Daddy died?”

What? Um, no. My husband, her dad, was in the bathroom at that very moment. Though I often wondered if he’d died in there, his cardiac muscles were very active. 

She had clearly conflated our carefully explained family arrangement with some version of the tragedies of every fairy tale in the archives–in which the mother, wholesome and pure and deserving of better–dies, and her surrogate is a heartless mooch, the undoing of every stepmother ever. 

She’d done a whole unit in school on Cinderella retellings, for God’s sake. I’d seen the chart paper hung on the classroom walls, listing archetypal adjectives to describe the stepmother: “SELFISH,” “UNKIND,” “VAIN.” Surely the literary exercise would have started with a clear definition? The only “parent” I hadn’t expected to see at the school’s Family Friday was that Disney Villain, the green-eyed interloper: she who married Cinderella’s father, a widower who appears only as a blip in the prologue, and reduces her stepchild to a dustbuster. 

When I met my husband, his children—then five and seven—were more like industrial fans, filling his tiny apartment with billowing life force. They beat me at Simplexity and regaled me with unfollowable anecdotes about airplanes; nothing about loving them was hard or sacrificial. The job only became hard later, when my presence in their lives was recast as a threat.

Though nominally better than her usual snack interrogation, this still counted as my soft parenting fail. Anything, I mean anything, can be misunderstood.

I went back to the start, as one must do often when raising children.

It occurred to me that, as often as she played with dolls and stuffies, I had never heard her stepparenting. Say, speaking gently of the “other” parent. Dropping her dolls off at their “other” house at a precise time in accordance with the parenting agreement dictates. Ensuring playdates were scheduled on her weekends, so school friends knew the children’s “non-custodial” parent’s house was not a mirage. Unballing stepchildren’s socks that mushroomed everywhere and washing them, so when they returned to their “biological, true” house, they could account for every single item that had been on their person when they arrived. 

My six-year-old burst my thought bubble: “When can I get a stepmother?” Fair is fair. But you can cross that off your holiday list. 

“Hopefully never,” I said, then realized that could be me demeaning my own identity. Where were the stepmothers she could root for in her children’s books, the ones who were awesome and made the role look compelling, or at least worthy of representation? An incidental but present character rather than a plot twist? One who remembered the children’s permission slips, packed their lunches, washed their socks, did the hundred boring things parents do? 

Although I couldn’t poof make her have a stepmother, I could give her something step-adjacent, on which Disney has bet literal money: chores! A disproportionate amount of them that we stepmothers dole out from beneath our dark brooding veil, ruining any chance that a child has time for, say, childhood. Cinderella, as stepdaughter, is reduced to pure, degrading laborer by her stepmother’s schadenfreude within her father’s home: she must scour, scrub, wash, and boil. In one version, she fruitlessly sorts lentils from ashes, while the stepfamily observes at leisure. 

The pediatrician’s yearly newsletter reminded me that six-year-olds love chores. Fill ‘em right up!!  Cinderella’s stepmother, hair swept up in a grey imposing heart-shaped pompadour—the only evidence of heart—had no trouble coming up with developmentally inappropriate tasks. She instructs Cinderella, who copes by singing through her domestic burdens, to re-clean the pristine carpets, chore as aesthetic. Naturally dramatic, Aria could snag the role of Cinderella easily. We even had an underused montessori-style child-size broom for her new barren life at another woman’s barren hearth. 

I mean, what screams barrenness, and possibly contagious barrenness, and especially vindictive chore distribution like a stepmother who, where other mothers might cradle a sleeping baby, holds only her own cold mirror in her hands? (Even if she has her own bio children. They must be bots!!) I could really gussy up the stepmother-face for Aria. 

Turns out, even as an actual stepparent, I didn’t excel at the unfair chore allocation. 

Before they chose to live with us solely, my stepkids had two houses, and went back and forth in whiplash fashion. For sure, the only person whose chore list spiked was me.  I nosedived into what it meant to have little people in your care, to protect them emotionally and physically, while also teaching them they could handle life as it was and as they were. Oh, and snacks. God, the endless snacks. The only poison on the apple was in traces of pesticides–not my doing so much as what Big Agro has done to Mother Earth. 

As much as we believe children should contribute meaningfully to a household, it was hard to enforce any routine with the rigidity required to qualify as sufficiently Evil.  If the mother is sublimated as bottomlessly compassionate and forgiving, absorbing not only all the sins of the world but all the loads of laundry into her orbit, the stepmother is her repellent psychic shadow, discharging care work and suffering onto the vulnerable in her orbit, preoccupied with her own newfound dominion.

There is emotional jetlag specific to divorced households, and the conditioning and culture varies in each. When my stepkids would arrive at our house before they were with us full time, they needed reregulation, and time to arrive fully, to catch up on sleep, homework, and meals. Floor mopping would have to wait (the mice in the walls clapped—our loss, their gain). My itch for structure was only half-scratched. 

So as a steppie, I had failed at what the literature bequeathed me: the avocation to focus only on whatever was best for me, and to let others wither from the consequences. 

“You probably will never have a stepmother,” I told my daughter, whose pout I was pretty sure was just a reflex and not a referendum on my choices. “Because I’ve learned in my front row seat that divorce is faaaaaar too expensive, and the documentation required gives me hives!” 

Confused, she followed me and the regrettable broccoli I’d seared into the living room. Her ear for sarcasm skewed: was I serious? 

Yes—of course not!

I looped my arm around her shoulders, comforting her for her perceived loss, as she descended into distraction at our catchall table, where mail piles go to die. Ignoring the broccoli, which deserved it, she drew plump hearts on the back of our insurance EOB from my recent ultrasound. 

Honestly, would it not be amazing if everyone wanted a stepmother? Was disappointed not to have one? If the children in our most adored books went to bed praying for yet another parent, to be chock-full of parents, to have so many ways to love and be loved? To navigate different temperaments and family systems? 

“Plus,” I added. “Daddy and I plan to stay married, and we cherish each other.” She nodded as she drew a soothing stick figure portrait of our family of 6.5: two parents with matching ponytails (facts); two much older siblings, standing tall in platform shoes, one slightly older brother who was rendered like a fighting fish, and one ambiguously gendered sibling in (my) utero. 

What you don’t do can be as important as what you do. I didn’t lean in and micromanage her drawing, pointing out, “Honey, the big ones are HALF brothers. Maybe erase some of their face or a leg to clarify? And be sure to say this is your blended family. We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea!!!” 

No, I just watched her wreathe the image of our family in the (and her) most universal symbol: the heart. We all looked alike in her rendering, because what we have in common is more obvious to her than all our differences. 

Marriage is a lot of work and we are also real people who sometimes struggle. Children don’t need to be entirely shielded from that, nor should our darker side be their burden to carry. 

I imagine there is (probably) a part of a person that dies when they leave a marriage—maybe part of Aria’s dad did die, and so she is right; that is why I’m a stepmother. So too might die the primordial dreams of children who learn (too young) that not everything is OK, or works out OK. 

Then what? Is it cruel to validate this? Is it confusing to my daughter or son—or for that matter my stepkids who lived through it—that a marriage (so easily romanticized, even when it is as romantic as a saucepan) can, and does for some, end in protracted enemyship? 

That the connection you once cherished (or professed to), you now crave the most state-sanctioned distance from? That the poles of human behaviors and affections can be extreme? That the adults can both do the best they can, and that might not be enough? 

If we respect our children, there are many things we have to set straight over time. There are a sea of paradoxes in which they must find their own keel because our model is not sufficient.   

We have to own when we (inadvertently or not) give them the wrong idea about how things are. I refuse to limit how my children—step or biological—see family and our sense of responsibility to one another, and to something more, regardless of biological relations. On what does love rest? When you have no examples, you invent your own. I don’t care if I have to explain this every day to Aria, or if it never really makes sense. Some things don’t. 

“So,” I said to my six-year-old, here we go again. “Daddy was married to K & Q’s mommy for many years. They decided to have children, and K and Q came from their mommy’s body. Then they were fighting and not creating a happy home together for their kids. So they decided it would be better to have two separate homes. That’s called divorce.”

“You and daddy fight!” She protested. They. Are. Always. Looking.

“Of course we do. Do you and Ro fight?”

“Yes, but I tattle more.”

“Correct.”

“Like this morning he was being mean and—“

“Not the point. But listen, I met Daddy after that—“

“—and he said he wouldn’t talk to me if I told on him and I said I would tell on him anyway because he wasn’t being kind and—“

“Do you want to know what a stepmother is?”

“Can I have a snack? What are the choices?”

When Aria asks me her innocent questions, she tugs up not just an answer, but the barbed weight of mythologies stepmothers must contend with, and the dangers we bring to domesticity. The question of why these myths endure, if reality is so versatile. 

The etymology of the prefix step means orphaned, from German; but perhaps the real orphan is not the child whose biological mother is “pushed out,” but the person who steps in to parent without any liberating paradigms. 

We all want to see ourselves as a bit better than we are in our inner cellars.  Do I sometimes, as the accusation goes, act stingy with my affection? Maybe when I am tired. Do I sometimes want to hoard resources from the children in my care? Yes, because they’ve proven again and again they will never save me any blueberries, even if I buy three pints. But is it not forgivable and human to want some sweetness for yourself?