You don’t go through a divorce at 40 years old, the fearsome learning curve of online dating or the challenges of dating a dad whilst lacking a shred of maternal instinct without some bits that really sting. Dividing up household belongings, furnishing an apartment with rental furniture that exudes all the cosy vibe of a supermarket coolroom and the hearbreak that is divvying up half of your elderly cat’s ashes (because shared cat custody in life extends to shared custody in the afterlife) are just some of the blows that land hard.
Like me, you will survive all of that, propped up in my case by plenty of sauv-blanc-fuelled couch time and rock-solid best friends. You’ll emerge eventually, with a new sense of resilience and potentially a new wardrobe, depending on how heavily you subscribed to the divorce diet. After a while, your heart will move on from the listless malaise of heartbreak and the depressive impact wrought by consumption of white spirits, and open up to the concept of a new emerging relationship.
If you have wound your way through the ghosters, players and no-limit baggage-toters of later-in-life singledom, you may feel that the little stabby moments of heartbreak are behind you. However if you marry a Dad and set up camp in the suburbs with some fully-formed miniature humans, be prepared for some verbal barbs that feel like undiluted apple cider vinegar on an open vein.
They come in the form of things people say to a stepmother.
Google the combo of ‘say’ and ‘stepmother’ and the interwebs will present you exactly 9.6 octodecillion helpful tips about what a stepmother shouldn’t say. Camouflaged about 9.5 octodecillion records in are the almost-mute protests of a camp of stepmothers who politely try to offer up suggestions about what you should not say to THEM.
Here are a few.
‘You knew what you were getting into’
It’s worth getting this one out the way early – if there was nation-wide census of the phrase most often heard by any step-parent, regardless of gender, it’s this one. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this one I would have a dedicated shoe-room, my mid-life crisis second car (a Mustang GT, which is a nod to my ability to love a non-age-appropriate bogan vehicle which began in my owning a 70s Torana as my first ride) and a scratch golf handicap.
Despite the sheer number of stepmothers who are nodding at this, fortified as we so often are on a Sunday by a chilled beverage, if we were to band together and protest this statement in the streets with Canva-crafted placards, we’d be run out of town with the last of the climate change deniers.
Fact: we didn’t know what we were getting into.
There is no Stepmum-prep 101. A distinct lack of Netflix documentary material. If only there was a clan of wise elder Stepmothers that would whisper truths to you in Primary School in the same way you get ‘The Talk’ when you approach a certain age. But there isn’t. The term ‘Stepmommy blogger’ is not common parlance. Even if every stepmother wrote online about every experience, our musings would be buried well beneath pinterest vision-boards featuring ideas for school lunches that are now apparently only palatable if served in bento boxes.
So we didn’t know.
‘You aren’t their mother’
Well, throw on a cape and call yourself Captain Obvious.
I know I am not their mother. Everything about my unblemished womb, unresolved tendency to lapse into hyperventilation in the proximity of bulk baby supply stores and festering feelings of resentment at their being no concept of ‘pawternity leave’ is testament to my never having borne a child.
However in my years as a stepmother, I have been called upon to execute on a range of duties that are fair and square the domain of a mother. I have made cake for a bake sale – even if it involved decanting a supermarket loaf cake onto a paper plate and giving it a blatant bedazzling with the leftover sugar flowers from our wedding cake. I’ve done school pickup – pushing bravely through the fear that is contemplating dozens of identically-clad children without the innate ability to identify a child through a longstanding observance of their distinguishing traits. I’ve laundered countless garments and suffered the pilfering of my favourite sports socks once a tweenager’s feet approximated the size of my own. I’ve made countless meals that were scorned with all the vehement protests that biological mothers suffer.
I’m not their mother, nor do I need to be. I don’t need to share DNA to share the responsibility of preventing a child from running into traffic or ingesting poison.
So far, so good.
‘When are you having kids of your own?’
This is one that everyone in the sisterhood, not just the stepmotherhood, can get behind. There’ll be barely a woman that hasn’t been asked at some point when they are going to do their duty to the perpetuation of the human race by issuing some progeny. In the early years of my first married go-round, if I felt particularly ill-favoured towards the enquirer, a favoured response would be ‘It’s not in God’s plan’ with an appropriately downcast expression. Shuts it right down.
As the years go on, this question has fallen by the wayside. This is likely due to the fact that despite hefty investment in anti-ageing creams, its clearly becoming obvious that with the passage of time, my reproductive organs are likely to be in about as good nick as my 1975 Torana.
By definition, Stepmothers are hardy souls. We wouldn’t be navigating child support arrangements, shared-household logistics and the management of children that aren’t our own without a little resilience.
But spare us some of these questions.
If in doubt, there is one that’s always acceptable:
‘Would you like a glass of red or white with that?’