Times Of Swaziland: STEPMOTHER, STEPCHILD TUG-OF-WAR

STEPMOTHER, STEPCHILD TUG-OF-WAR
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The Editor on 29/11/2017 04:35:00


Sir,
Children who are mourning the loss of a deceased parent or the separation or
divorce of their birth parents may need time to heal before they can fully
accept a new parent.
For those whose birth parents are still alive, remarriage may mean the end of
hope that their parents will reunite. Even if it has been several years since
the separation, children often hang onto that hope for a long time.
From the children’s perspective, this reality can make them feel angry, hurt
and confused. But girls, young women and adult women in particular are likely to
model their mothers’ feelings and behaviours and subscribe to their beliefs
regarding their divorce from their fathers.
This fact, plus the fact of an ex-wife’s resentment of her husband
re-partnering, often fuels the fire of a stepdaughter’s hostility toward her
stepmother. A stepmother-stepdaughter tug of war can transform an innocent young
girl into a monster. But do we ever consider how much that poor woman is pushed
until she breeds equally angry monsters?
Many stepchildren have negative feelings about their stepmothers that often have
nothing whatsoever to do with the women themselves. Although stepmothers are
often perceived as ‘cold’, stepchildren are prone to projecting onto them
anger at their fathers that they can’t express, guilt over their unhappy
mothers, and negative feelings about their parents’ divorces.
Stepchildren are often put off by the generosity and kindness of their stepmums.
Whatever decisions a stepmother and father make behind the scenes together,
those decisions are often perceived as coming from the stepmother alone. She’s
taken over the father’s life; he’s an innocent victim to her scheming.
Stepchildren, even when they’re adults, often experience stepmothers as having
‘stolen’ their fathers from them.
The truth is that many stepmothers work so hard to be ‘nicer’ such that they
lose their footing in the family and their needs become subordinated to the
greater good, often until they feel like ghosts in their own homes.
The fact that they chose to marry their father despite the children is enough to
show how much they sacrifice. The common take on tensions between stepmothers
and stepchildren in our culture is, of course, that stepmothers are
overwhelmingly likely to be nasty, petty and jealous creatures. It would only
follow that their stepchildren dislike and reject them.
But that’s just the problem. For it turns out that the root of much of the
tension between stepmothers and stepchildren is in lived experience, not just in
myth. As it turns out, it’s not just that most women with stepchildren try
hard, at least initially. It’s that they feel they have to, because they face
significant challenges that a stepfather doesn’t.
As stepfamilies become statistically normative, we have the opportunity to
re-write the step-mothering script along lines that are less fantastical and
rooted in myth, and more rooted in the day-to-day realities of stepfamily life.
Families should try to forget the idealized ‘blended’ label and try not to
do everything together all the time. Stepchildren should not try to divide the
two parents, but they need to know that the husband and wife (stepmother) come
first and that they are a unified team.
Sibusisiwe L