Telling Someone How to Be a Stepmom…

Telling someone how to be or not be a stepmom when you've never been a stepmom before is like telling someone how to be a parent when you've never had kids before. Perhaps we judge stepmoms so harshly because we believe it is our role to correct them. Maybe it's such unfamiliar territory that we try our hardest to make it comparable to something we do know. We see how "mom" and "dad" do it, and we hold stepmoms to the same standard. If they fall short of this standard, they are bad.

If they want to change standards in their family unit that aren't working, they are blamed for causing disruption, even when that disruption of dysfunctional patterns is for the best of all involved. Because we've been mothers, daughters, aunts, you name it, we think it's our place to tell stepmoms what their place is. Stepmoms have already accepted a higher level of control over their life than any "regular" parent would ever deem appropriate to accept, when they accepted to become legally attached to a broken family that has broken systems in place. All we seem to have to offer stepmoms is more rules and boxes to exist within in their blended family, simply because we think we're entitled to defining their role in their family for them. But we would never dream of asking a mother to live under the same crushing pressure on top of the already complex role they are in. Until you can magically walk a day in a stepmom's shoes, it is not your place to correct them. Stepmoms are dehumanized and scapegoated far too easily, when, in fact, stepmoms are the only people walking into the families they didn't break in a legally-bound, daily way. They are putting their hearts and heads into these family systems and are trying to make them better. Because of the nature of broken families, the "odd-man-out" can easily get blamed. It is often a varying degree of a trauma-response to the divorce that bio-parent/child dynamics become enmeshed and operate out of dysfunctional patterns. These ways of functioning then become their "normal."

If a stepmom isn't impermeable to extreme external factors (what an unrealistic expectation for any human), these dysfunctions parading themselves as "normal" often get to them. When stepmoms then contribute external behaviors reacting to dysfunctions, confinements, and control within the broken family unit, they often become the blamed counterpart for any disruption going on within the household. Often, the bio-parent isn't fully letting that stepmom into their life as a partner in marriage or as a partner in parenting, on top of the difficult dynamics innately faced by stepmoms when choosing to love and raise children that are not theirs. Often, difficulties form with the bio-parent the stepmom is married to, and often more difficulties are created by the bio-parent that is on the "outside" of the new family unit that the stepmom and other bio-parent have formed.