Friendship & family as a childless stepmother
Anon, UK, aged 52.
My grieving journey as a childless woman is interwoven with my journey through adjusting to the realities of having my husband’s two teenage children in my life part-time.
Well-meaning friends who have children often ask about my husband’s kids as a way to ‘bond’ or share. The more thoughtful ones don’t! Or rather, the sensitive ones ask me how I am, and include recognition that I face a particular challenge with having someone else’s teenagers in and out of my life. In close 1:1 situations I can properly check whether I actually want to talk about them or not. Sometimes I do actually want to, but often I just talk about them, or my similarly aged niece or nephew, as part of my wish to belong to the people around me, many of whom I’ve been friends with for 30 years or more. My own family of origin, let alone my husband’s family, often default to talking about the kids too. I notice my relief and ease when we find other things to build connection. I am often on auto-pilot, or collude with the focus on the teenagers and then notice afterwards how dissatisfied, sad, lonely and frustrated I feel. Sometimes after these times with others, where his kids are there or are referred to, I often end up in deeper longing for my own never-to-be-born children and for the connections I imagine they would have enriched, especially with my close friends and family.
The few friends who don’t have children (both childless and child-free) tend to ask less, yet when they do, are pretty mystified by the answers: it can be as if I have to summarise that part of my life quickly and move on, when of course it can be the dominant thing at the time. As I write this, I am noticing the value (to me) of at least attempting to articulate some of what happens for me and then getting curious about how else I might navigate these situations.
Whilst I knew that by the time they actively came into my life, I was highly unlikely to have children with my husband, I still had some tiny hope. Despite letting go of that hope at least 2 years ago, I have found that some aspects of my stuckness with my grief are pretty interlinked with the ongoing pressures and triggers in ‘family’ life. Except of course, the children (2 teenagers) are not my family: I have not known them all their lives; I don’t have that foundational history with them; our shared history includes significant strains and stresses, despite my best efforts to be open-hearted and also hold my tongue and my nerve at times. There are moments when I cannot tell what triggered me– the ‘step’ element or being ‘childless’
I want to prioritise my healing, the work of grief that I know needs time and space AND there are teenagers in my home most weekends who I care about and yet at times I wish they weren’t around. I am incredibly grateful that I have a garden to spend time in, and enough space in the house to do my own thing at times. However, it’s the time to do some of my grief work WITH my husband that I crave, or to be able to dip in and out of feelings in a natural, flow way, rather than juggling their diaries, their changes of plan, their expectations on him and by extension, me. And this year, we are going away for a couple of nights to give my and our grief some attention. Yes, another part of this that doesn’t get talked about, my husband is grieving too – he has children, but he does not have children with me and we have not had the joy of parenting together. It is all too easy to overlook this in a ‘he’s got his kids’ kind of way.
And I wonder what may have changed since my husband named my sadness and our joint sadness more publicly earlier this year – perhaps the door is ajar for us both to be more open about the complexities of this life, when we feel safe enough to do so. I know that is important for our marriage that I do not grieve alone and that I find and co-create my role in his children’s lives in sustainable ways.