Megan K. Gordon
How do I feel as a childless stepparent, you ask?
I find this question both painful and inspiring. My answer shifts from week to week, month to month. Despite my best efforts to understand and feel into what this role means to me, it’s an ever-shifting puzzle. I feel especially conflicted when confronted with the clear and unambiguous ways bioparents around me usually experience themselves and are treated by others. But as time goes on, I’m starting to live into the complexity of this identity – in ways that surprise me, and encourage hope for myself and others without biological children.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely in the thick of coming to terms with being a stepparent. There is so much to take in. Confusion about your role. Frustration about the behaviors of kids and parents you’ve had no role in influencing. Hope for a new version of family, followed by disappointment or despair. Fear you will always feel this way and be trapped. Loneliness that others in your family are connected to each other and no one shares your experiences. At least one of these experiences, if not many, have likely haunted you in recent months.
As they did for me. I’m now three years into my relationship with two boys, who were eight and five when we met. I was hopeful and excited at first. Yet while I enjoyed them from the outset– they are kind and silly and bright, and have always been welcoming of me – their sometimes wild fighting with each other exhausted me. My partner, who only saw his kids on the weekends because his ex moved away during the divorce, approached parenting with a weekend warrior’s gusto. Eager to absorb every minute with his precious boys and make their time with him So Much Fun, his nonstop activity, museums, board games, playgrounds, TV, coloring and chatter upended all my restorative and adult routines.
Finding my own space and identity became even harder when we moved in together a year later. Through the kids I would feel the influence of their mother as they raised their voices and struggled to control each other, harshly criticizing others as they enforced arbitrary (to me) rules and discipline. Uneasy with an ethos and culture in my own home that wasn’t mine, worn down by the commotion, I would sneak out and seek respite on the roof of our condo. Staring at the skyline, inhaling the relative peace of the city hum, I struggled to make meaning of these seismic changes. Where was my life going? What kind of family did I want? What could I give to this man I loved and to these children, which would also fulfill me?
For several intertwined reasons stemming from my own life’s circumstances as well as the realities of this family I was joining, bringing a new child into the mix myself did not feel like an option. While I now feel at peace with this, getting there was a process – a process involving a mix of grief, relief, anger, fear, confusion, and eventually hope and humor. My experience of feeling like an “outsider” and alienated within my own family resurfaced core childhood wounds of feeling like the “different” one, triggering the beginnings of a depressive episode. Helped along by weekly psychotherapy, a low dose antidepressant, and a monthly support group for childless stepmothers, I spent the next couple of years exploring, interrogating, and coming to terms with my experience.
To chart the terrain I covered over those years would require a memoir, not a blog post. And like a traveler fresh from a journey and eager to share slides and stories, but also cautious about boring others, I am wary about the etiquette and ethics of sharing too much. Especially about the boys, too young to speak for themselves, or their blended family members, who I know act with good intentions, and have largely opened space for and respected me.
But I can share something I longed to hear when I was at the depths of my confusion and frustration with this role, a message I found it almost impossible to find when I went in search of information on being a childless stepmother: this can be a wonderfully deep, fulfilling and important parenting role. Both for yourself and for the children in your life.
Much of the literature supporting stepmothers is simplified, lacking nuance as much as the caricature of the evil stepmother it aims to counter. It emphasizes the challenges and stresses of the role. Dismissive kids and “high conflict” exs (“Stepmoming Ain’t Easy!” declares one site’s title) dominate. This is important material to be sure, but also alarmist and sometimes catastrophic, as self help content that offers its services as part of the solution can be. At another extreme, the modern childless stepmom is whitewashed, uncomplicatedly content. Think of depictions of American Vice President Kamala Harris – perhaps the last person you’d think of as a Stepford wife – whose relationship with her stepkids (likely crafted by a PR team determined to present her as nurturing and maternal) is reduced to chipper descriptions of the saccharine sunday night family dinners she cooks.
My experience of stepparenting involves neither of these extremes. Neither catastrophic nor ideal, it is its own evolving relationship. The kids and I have our own rituals, from books we read together to weekly farmers market excursions As the only parent around them who has lived in many different countries, I’ve been introducing them to people from around the world, nurturing an open minded passion for travel, food and exploration that I myself cherish. I grew up in Australia, and have been teaching them how to perfect their Aussie accents -- so comically off they reduce us all to laughing tears. I work as a psychotherapist, and have brought a new skill set to the family. My stress levels have gone down as their emotional regulation skills and ability to talk about what they’re thinking and feelings has gone up. I love them, and they love me back, calling me “Meg meg”, their made up name for me that echoes “mommy” . Both have asked me to promise never to leave them (the fear and insecurity of their parents’ divorce still smarting), and the little one once told me I was “the best gift” he’s ever gotten. This love, of course, has come with the other side of the splitting all parents experience – in addition to the ideal, I’m often the object of stomping tantrums and declarations that I am “so mean!!” if I withhold something they want.
And yet at the same time – and equally true – while they do feel like my kids, they also don’t feel like my own kids. I’ve found relief in this. I don’t feel the burden of transmitting the inheritances of my family of origin. I don’t feel heavy responsibility for their conduct. I don’t have to do all of the (to me) mind-numbing parts of parenting, like school logistics and doctor’s visits and extracurricular drop offs, or meal prep for fussy palates day in and out with no breaks. I don’t feel guilty going out for dinner with my friends or doing Sunday morning yoga, knowing their dad is their primary guardian. I don’t struggle with projecting myself into them, with the expectation, and inevitable disappointment, that they will reflect or perpetuate some part of myself. And – a hope I project into the future – precisely because I’m not mom or dad, I don’t have as much authority or deference to lose as they separate and differentiate into adulthood. That’s a time when many bioparents confront a role and identity shift as confounding as what I experienced when I embarked on this path.
All of these dimensions I name here as attributes could easily be experienced as profound losses. Especially through the lens of grief, which takes time to metabolize and heal. And they are losses. Yet they also aren’t. Stepparenting, as I am living into it, is like looking through a kaleidoscope. I can’t change the pieces inside. These are the circumstances I have to work with. I don’t have children of my own. My husband had children with another woman. Her influence is all through my own household. I have to participate in looking after kids I did not shape. They have habits and behaviors I find stressful, which I can influence but not change. But with a subtle shift of perception, gently turning the kaleidoscope — holding the whole pile up and squinting through it towards the light— the same pieces collapse and transform into something intriguing, something beautiful, something illuminated with a newfound meaning. I have freedom and autonomy. I get to play a crucial role in raising and shaping little humans, without suffering the hardest aspects of parenting.
And – a truth available to all women facing childlessness, who must struggle to overcome the narrow and proscriptive ways our culture offers women meaning and value – I know true love and relationships are more expansive and deeper than mere biology or officially sanctioned social roles.
My own life is living proof.
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash