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I hate being a so-called stepparent…
12 Oct 2008 by Rod Smith in Difficult Relationships, Victims, Voice / 12 Comments
“You never win when you are a stepparent because the child comes first and the child can never be wrong in the parents’ eyes. If any stepparent says anything negative about the child regardless how young or old, we will always be seen as the evil one. My ‘fiancé’ said we will not get married until his son and I get along which means he wants me to look the other way when his son orders me around and talks to me anyway he wants too because daddy isn’t going to do anything about it. But I will not put up with it either from anyone but my own parents. I am forty and no twelve-year-old has the right to tell me what to do. I hate being a so-called stepparent. It’s making my life a living hell and I am so miserable because I am always the one to blame for everything!”
I’d suggest both “daddy” and “stepmother” do a little growing up before walking down the aisle. When a forty-year-old writes like an angry twelve year old might write, I can only wonder what’s going on in the home! Stop fighting. Get some distance. You are not peers and yet is seems you are fighting like angry little siblings. Besides, if you hate it before you’re married you most certainly won’t find it too attractive once you are. What is in this for you? A man who treats you like a child and a boy with whom you seem to have issues of sibling rivalry. Then, and I must ask, why do you, an adult, allow your parents to treat you with any degree of disregard? Herein perhaps lies something of the root of the issue.About the Author: Rod Smith
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
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12 Comments
Anonymous
I agree, you can’t compete with blood.
We will end up angry for the rest of our live if we keep tolerate this.
Leave the man and let him deal with his kid.
(The writer — ‘Anonymous’ — of this comment was foul-mouthed and I edited his/her language. Angry letters, or the evidence of anger in the letters, suggest step-children have a lot to deal with! Rod Smith)
12 Oct 2008 10:10 pm
tlc4women
I agree you should either get out of this relationship or at the very least take a time-out.
I have been a step for seven years now. I’m 43 and have a lot of life experience but nothing could have prepared me for the difficulty that awaited me.
A couple of things stand out to me though. You say the child always comes first and you can never win but that is the point isn’t it? God forbid I should die, but if so, I would expect my children to be put first to any future relationship.
Next you say you are the fiancee not yet the step but you are wanting to be in the position of step before the actual marriage. That just seems unrealistic. I can tell you honestly that when you are the step you won’t have a parenting role either.
I would have a long engagement of 6 years before I got married. That seems to be the best bet for the three of you.
13 Oct 2008 02:10 pm
NotUrMother
I have been a stepmother for 6 years and let me tell you, I was not prepared. The son who is 15 weighs 230 pounds and since I make him eat veggies, which he does not anywhere else, he has compained to his doctor that I force feed him till he pukes. He is now turning the younger of the two against me too….. Their mother is flippen nuts and still calls my husband out like a dog, screaming at him and telling him that he is an F-en bad father. Ohhh, he’s an ordained minister. So not only are you getting the kids you get an ex wife too!
16 Feb 2009 08:02 pm
Jolanta
If you can , run for the hills. I am a step parent and their is nothing rewarding about selfish step kids. I wish mine would move far away with his nutso mother.
03 Apr 2009 09:04 pm
Walter
Run, run, run as fast as you can! Never under any circumstances become a stepparent. It is Hell. There should be a law against becoming a stepparent. It is a no win situation. The stepchild will hate you, and you will be praying for the day the stepchild leaves home. It is horrible. All you parents out there if you divorce your spouse, or your spouse dies, do not remarry until your children have left home. You’ll save your children from hating another human being and you will save the sanity of another adult along with your own.
21 May 2009 02:05 am
sammie
i have to concur, as much as i hate to say it. i’ve been a stepmother for 7 years and it’s misery. i’ve been a stepdaughter, too, for 28 years and it’s not much more fun. there are certainly positive times, but overall i would never do this again. i have no one to blame but myself – i saw perfectly well that my husband’s ex was a basketcase for the three years we dated before marrying (they’d been divorced for 7 years when we met), i saw that my stepdaughter was truly a spoiled brat (lots of divorce guilt had led her parents to give her whatever she wanted, on demand), i saw that my husband was not cut out for serious parenting, and yet i married him anyhow (he’s got many other great qualities – including being a good stepfather to my son, go figure). our marriage is pretty solid, and we often all get along passably well, but the amount of turmoil his daughter strives to stir up is more than tiring. we’ve been through loads of therapy, but in the end his ex hates him, and by extension me, so much that she has literally ruined any chance of us having a sincere relationship with my stepdaughter. if it weren’t for the stability this marriage provides in so many other ways, i would be out of here. i have a great relationship with my ex, and his wife, and my son does with his stepmother, but my husband and stepdaughter – deeply flawed.
07 Jun 2009 05:06 pm
Rod E. Smith, MSMFT
Your observation that your husband is not cut out for “serious parenting” is pivotal. Under functioning is more dangerous than a “basket-case” ex. Things will change if he notches up his functioning to fully fulfill his role. You’re protecting him. Your mutual relationship with the daughter is not primarily in the mother’s hands.
08 Jun 2009 05:06 am
lissy
everyone who has made these comments needs to take a serious look at your relationships…maybe you should have before you got in them. I can’t believe how much blame you all put on the children. My husbands ex-girlfriend is crazy, but we all deal with it. My step-daughter can be snotty, but she knows who is in charge. She does all she is asked and in the end she is the child and I am the adult. The adult should be mature and the facillitator of the relationship. I have an amazing relationship with my step-daughter, it didn’t come without work, but we have made it happen together. You guys obviously need a lot of work.
10 Jun 2009 03:06 pm
Cece
Run….run the other way and fast. I AM married and have 2 step children. I bite my tongue a lot but I do not know how much I can take. You may love your husband dearly, but obviously you, as his future wife, your feelings are not important or else he would sit down and talk to you and help you validate your feelings and let you know your just as important to him as his children are.
19 Jun 2009 01:06 pm
Cece
To lissy…sometimes it’s not us blaming the children but rather our partners who promise that things will work out and they will make every effort to ensure everyones needs and feelings are met. It’s hard being an outsider. It’s you ( the step parent ) then your spouse +children + ex spouse. I have no children…at all. So My husbands ex has this mind set that because she has children with him, she is the most important woman in his life and because I am not the bio mom…I am not in charge AT ALL in my home as far as how the children are raised are diciplined. Believe it or not…the step parents in this equation are human beings too..not just the children and we too want to feel that we are cared for and considered in this big equation too.
19 Jun 2009 04:06 pm
tlc4women
lissy, I don’t think I said anything about it being the child’s fault or a faulty relationship. I think I made it clear that if the OP is having these many problems before marriage, she needs to take a serious look and step back.
That being said, I am glad you have a great relationship with your stepchild. Not everyone does and from what I read, you are the exception not the rule. Feeling superior to people who were honest in this post however helps no one.
20 Jun 2009 09:06 pm
Anonyms105
I met my husband when his kids were 3 and 7, I thought that I would learn to love someone elses child and that it would just take time to bond. We are now married with a child of our own and his kids are now 5 and 9, their bio mom is and has always been the bigges B ever and does nothing but try to put both my husband and me down in the kids eyes yet at the same time she honestly only wants her kids around to collect the check from the government and child support from my husband, the kids are sweet and loving but I still find it hard to bond to them as they always pull away or it’s always about mommy this and mommy that, it makes it hard to bond. And at times I just want it to be me my children and husband while the others just stay with their mom. I know how this sounds but seriously can anyone of you tell me that you immediately love and like everyone that is married into your family because that’s all it is they were married in they just happen to be smaller. I am not a bad or evil person I simply dislike having to be caring and attentive to another persons child when I get none (and I mean none) of the reward they will always love their mother more and that’s the way it should be but your feelings can only take so much rejection from another being before it starts to completely resent them even when they are being nice. for instance my step daughter love’s my daughter and is a great big sister but like when we do crafts together she will make something and say from beginging to end I’m making this for you and how do you like it and she’ll get really excited but then when she’s finished she turns and says you know what I’m going to give this to mommy instead but thats okay because you saw me making it right. I know it’s innocent and she doesn’t mean to hurt me but when she does this 10 times in a row you eventually get frusterated and very sad and find your lashing out at a 5 year old the next time she says she’s making something for you, you end up saying “your really making it for your mom so just say you are T because that’s the truth so don’t lie)
Please no hater’s I’m already sad with how I thought this would go. but how can you bond when at every turn they pull away, I’ll tell you how you don’t thats how. and then eventually your heart turns off towards them and all your left with is wondering why you thought being a step parent would be great.
23 May 2011 01:05 pm
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