THE EVIL STEP-MOTHER and how to stop yourself from becoming one
I have been pondering this post for a week now. And I’m still not exactly sure where to start.
Our kids have been in their new schools for three weeks now. They are loving their schools and loving life, for the most part. Our three youngest all go to the same elementary school and our oldest is a middle school student for the first year this year. Hence the official blending date of our family under one roof this summer. We figured it would be easiest, especially for our oldest if he had not yet started middle school somewhere else and gotten used to his new friends there. Unfortunately, his mother does not see it this way. In all fairness though, she really just did not approve of any changes to her ex-husband’s family situation, certainly none which have the potential of making him happy. And, evidently, that American saying of “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” applies to ex-mommas of a household/family even more. And if she ain’t happy, we can feel it in the atmosphere, even if she’s nowhere near when we pick up the kids on a day she dropped them off in the morning. I’d imagine this is mostly because it’s a much earlier morning for them and they don’t have the same routine at her house as they do here, so it kind of throws them off.
They are usually more tired and almost always more aggressive. Unfortunately, it is most often my 7-year-old son who ends up taking the brunt of whatever went on at my step-children’s mother’s house in the days leading up to us seeing each other again. I can only venture a guess that this is because he is the second youngest and by far not as strong as his 10-year-old sister. In any case, twice so far, my baby boy got kicked by my partner’s 6-year-old daughter before we even left the school yard, and at least once, his 11-year-old son shoved my son aside and into the wall at the house within ca. 15 minutes of getting home. That’s 3 instances in 3 school days, all of which started at their mother’s house and ended at ours over a 3-week period! But I digress.
Those days in particular do not invoke the most loving feelings towards James’ children in me, to put it mildly. Which brings me to the questions that I have been pondering again and again this past week:
Is the Evil Step-Mother born this way? Or, is she made to become an Evil Step-Mother by her environment? In other words: Is it nature or is it nurture?
In the same vein, how come there is such a thing as “the evil step-mother” when we hardly ever hear about “the evil step-father”? Is it the Brothers Grimm’s fault?
And, finally: How do I keep loving his two children like I do my own, even though they often behave less-than-deserving of my love? How can I continue treating all four children equally if they don’t behave equally well?
I couldn’t come up with many answers, other than:
- I KNOW I’m a nice person and I generally just want everyone to be happy; above all, the people in my life I love so much. So, if I display some evil step-mother traits, such as hugging my own kids first after school or giving them extra good-night cuddles, it is not that I was born this way. I taught at my kids’ school for four years and I sometimes had my kids’ classes. And, without fail, I treated everyone equally fairly; if anything, I was harder on my own kids than on any other one of my students! Surely, my daughter remembers well the incident from her second grade class, during which I had her sent her back down to Kindergarten, because she was disrupting class and that is how we generally handled disruptive students at the school.
- My step-children’s mother is nice, but – at least when we are around – not quite as nice of a person as me. It is usually me who smiles and greets her first (or only, since she often doesn’t respond at all) when we have to be at the same event or are standing in front of the school together at pickup. It is usually me who responds to her curt and often impolite texts to her ex-husband in a friendly, joking manner. And I promise I dislike her, too, even though I don’t have much of a reason to. In fact, we get along splendidly, so long as my partner/her ex-husband isn’t around. I certainly don’t hate her, as she reportedly does me (and my children, as told to us by her own kids), but I don’t necessarily wish her the million-dollar-jackpot-win either 😉 But, due to her sometimes unkind and mostly just plain impolite, poor-mannered behaviour towards me and my children during some of our encounters, she models for her own children that it is okay to treat us this way. This, in turn, changes her own children’s behaviour towards us and creates ripples in our family life, because it makes me have to correct her children’s behaviour, i.e. parent/teach her children basic human interaction manners that she evidently spends even less time on teaching than on modeling. And out comes the “evil step-mother” again, who is constantly reprimanding her step-children more than her own :/ As my friend (who has been through re-marriage, blending families, and then re-divorce) recently put it, “He kept saying that I was too hard on his daughter and that I was much easier on my own daughter. I told him that Sonia already learned good behaviour, but that Tora still needed to learn some basic forms.”
- I don’t think it’s the Brothers’ Grimm fault. I think that, generally speaking, ex-wives tend to be more bothersome than ex-husbands, partly because they often have more control over their offspring. But mostly because we women are evolutionarily the caregivers to our children in the back of the cave/home, while our men went out to chase first the wild boar for dinner and then the stock market to still “bring home the bacon”. We did carry those children for nine months, gave birth, which is so excruciatingly painful that men weren’t given the task to begin with, and then nursed them till our nipples bled. To have our children love another woman as much as they love their own mother, is a little like biting the hand that feeds you. Most women do not compartmentalize those feelings as well as most men might, when they see their children running towards another parent-figure in their lives. And then they become the “evil mothers”, the ones that will try anything in their power to reclaim their children, even if they originally didn’t want the kids and actually chose to spend most of their time away from them. That is, until another parent shows up and the kids run towards him or her. Men may just shrug and intelligently say to themselves, “I get it. It sucks when my kids run to her or him, but I get it.” And then they go back to work until they see their kids the next time.
- This one is the big one: While nothing would make me happier than knowing that my ex-husband, who is a nice guy and a good dad but just isn’t for me, had an equally nice new companion – one that adores our children and treats them appropriately – to share his life, my partner’s ex-wife seems to operate on the premise that she is and always has been the one and only for him and the kids. Aside from being the one and only in any of her new partners’ eyes, of which we’ve met two over the past year. I don’t think a child – any child – could ever have enough loving, caring adults in his life! So you either have to quite full of yourself to think that only you can fulfill several others’ needs or you have to have a low level of self-confidence to want the others to think that. I hope she doesn’t fall into either category, but in all cases, it makes one appear like a jealous person. And she certainly has no reason to be, given that she is in loving new relationship herself.
And here are the three magic steps to stop yourself from becoming the full-fledged Evil Step-Mother:
- – First, BREATHE! I consciously remind myself that it’s their mother’s, not the kids’ fault they act the way they do.
- – Then, I proceed to correct their behaviour the same way I would with my own children. If I feel that the behaviour requires a spanking (yes, I have spanked my children on occasion, after their third warning, which may or may not be why they behave so well), I defer to their father. If it’s a first or second offense, I employ the same technique as with my own kids: First, I calmly explain that they don’t have the right to do x, y, or z; second, I yell at them that they don’t have the right to do x, y, or z. The beauty of this is that they have either seen me exercise that exact behaviour with mine, or that mine can attest to the fact that they have experienced it at some time or another 🙂
- – When the kids are all behaving again, I remind myself again how I do not want to be in her shoes and how I should a) feel bad for her and b) thank her for being that way because if she and I were more alike, he might have tried a lot harder to stay with her and we would have never met. In the end, I’m the lucky step-mother after all 🙂
Empathy and understanding go a long way in making a blended, step-family and blended house succeed. And kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving of ways. And this might mean shoving my kid into the wall or kicking him in the shin when he excitedly runs up to hug the others hello. So I carry Arnica for his bruises 😀
Ashley@Shakenstirredandblended
Hi, I'm Ashley and I am a freelance writer and editor for one local and one national publication. In my spare time, I teach foreign languages and manage two households. Oh, and raise four children. It's a crazy life that I chose and I love every second of it :o)
