Category: Stepmother

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The (Stepmother) Princess Diaries

Having ‘Stepmother’ set up as a Google alert presents an endless array of fodder. More often than not it’s a fairly relentless reinforcement of the Disney villain style stepmother stories – women implicated in acts of casual violence, wilful neglect and harsh vengeance. Every now and then though, there’s a shiny little nugget nesting in the Google swamp. This week it was this headline.

Princess Beatrice could become a STEPMOTHER.

Note: I did not add the CAPS. The article had the CAPS, suggesting Princess Bea’s destiny was as astonishing as if she were to become an ASTRONAUT, PLAYBOY BUNNY or the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Had this publication unearthed the potential for her to become a scientologist, JayZ’s next wife or the host of American idol I feel they’d be less likely to lean on the caps lock.

I am inexplicably pleased at the ability to consider a young princess becoming a stepmother. Neither of these two fates were those that I’d considered a possibility as I contemplated my life plan. One of them did eventuate and it’s not the one that involves diamond tiaras, summer country estates and a brace of corgis.

Could the rocky road to stepmotherhood be less nuts and more pillowy marshmallows if you were a princess?  I think yes. Here’s why.

You are a princess

If you are a princess, dating a man with a little girl, surely you have hit the jackpot. Every little girl wants to be a princess. Very few little girls have a mama, even a faux-mama, who has hived off a portion of the crown jewels, has Phillip Treacy on speed-dial, and has a grandma who happens to be a reigning monarch. Surely it’s easier to impress a new step-girl if you are able to let her parade around the house in actual tiara that’s probably worth more than her actual mama’s house.

Note:  Princess Beatrice’s new boyfriend’s offspring only comprises a son which is just another example of the universe failing to cut a stepmother a break.

You have privileges – the child will pick up on this

Although the new royals are refreshingly modern and are at times spotted doing their actual own grocery shopping, they do generally operate in a cosy cushion of privilege.

As a royal, you don’t catch the bus. You are generally schlepped about in a black Range Rover.

Even if you are too low on the royal rungs to fly private, there is still no fear of being relegated to an egg and bacon burger in an airport Hungry Jacks. The doors of the highest status airport lounge will literally fling themselves open and welcome you in.

The kid’s Instagram is going to be next level.

Surely you can’t fear the bio mum

Stepmothers are innately prone to regarding themselves unfavourably in any comparison to a biological mother. Even on your best day, your most confident day, where all your pros far outweigh the cons, you are still reminded that your new partner had a flesh-and-blood child with this woman.

Princess Beatrice, on her darker days, might feel any of those feelings that she’s not smarter, prettier, or has fewer bad hair days than the child’s actual mother.

But darl, you’re still an actual princess. This is right up there with having actually spawned the child.

 

No financial fears

As a princess, the monarchy has been funding every frivolity you’ve ever engaged in since you emerged from the womb, no matter how many other heirs stand in front of you ascending a throne. Your mama’s pricey pram, the upmarket education, your time out to do good works and those sparkly earrings you flounced about in at your 21st.

NOWHERE in your future are you likely to experience any of the financial challenges that litter your regulation stepmother’s universe – trying to agree a fair split of school books and uniforms, rationing the extracurricular activities, figuring out who pays for the first passport.

Nor are you going to be subject to any of the vagaries of child support arrangements. You are part of the infrastructure that oversees the child support agency. No one married to a royal ever got garnisheed.

You are very likely to simply shut up the ex by leaping all the waiting lists and swiftly ensconcing your new stepchild in an upmarket, strictly blue-blood school whereupon all financial discussions will just drift away.

Good luck Princess Beatrice, hopefully you’ll pave the way so that the next royal stepmother doesn’t suffer the ALL-CAPS.

 

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The Real Stepmothers Of 2018

This one needs to start with a confession.

After a long period of resistance to every geographical flavour of the franchise, this year I succumbed to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s easy to see how this happened. Take a solitary Saturday afternoon, a glass of wine, the reaching of my limit for the inexplicable obsession that I have for the trainwreck that is My 600lb Life and I’ve clicked ‘play’ on the RHOBH. From that moment I was entranced by all the things I don’t have – endless wealth, cough lozenge-sized diamonds, garage-sized shoe rooms and an entourage of household staff. Although I’ve managed to kick the habit, after being relentlessly worn down by these ladies’ ability to fight with each other for no reason, it’s left a fairly pleasant legacy in my new love of Rosé, having discovered that it has evolved somewhat from daggy 80s Mateus.

With the relentless mental search for my next blog topic keeping stepmother-life as front of mind as my love of carbs and cheese, the concepts melded into a question. If you created a gaggle of all the famous stepmothers in history, miked them up, fooffed up their hair and gave them some first world problems in an Real Housewives setting, how would they fare?

But firstly, let me introduce the participants:

  • Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother. This lady was up against it, married as she was to a widowed woodcutter. She’d be endlessly compared to a tragic dead mother, times were tough in the woodcutting economy and forest life was no picnic.  She decides that her stepchildren were superfluous mouths to feed and exerts a honeymoon-period hold over her new husband to persuade him to abandon the kiddos in the forest. The children run into another bad woman who wants to eat them, despite the fact her entire house is made of cake.
  • Cinderella’s stepmother. Again, inclined to rampantly favour her bio kids over her stepchild, this lady enslaves her stepdaughter to a relentless regime of domestic duties and dull outfits. Cinderella defies all odds to be the chosen one at a ball where a  handsome prince auditions new wives in something that is uncannily similar to today’s ‘The Bachelor’.  She misses a pumpkin-inflicted curfew, loses a shoe but still gains a prince.  The stepmother is left sans one housekeeper and still managing a gaggle of lazy and homely offspring.
  • The Queen in Snow White. This lady has some issues. She starts down the well-worn path of subjecting Snow White to all the household chores and, disturbingly, seeks daily advice from a talking mirror. Once the talking mirror lets on that Snow White is the new goddess of the household, she orders her huntsman (because we all have one of those on staff?) to take her out in the forest and kill her.
  • Such is Stepmother lore, it turns out that we have one lovable, kind stepmother for every three incarnations of pure evil. The last to join the cast of the real stepmothers of 2018 is The Sound of Music heroine, Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music. However unlikely we might regard the journey from the nunnery, to whiskers on kittens, to marriage into Austrian aristocracy, this is a lady we can totally cheer for. She not only has to take on the legacy of a dead wife, but a living breathing competitor for the affections of Captain Georg Von Trapp in the form of someone who is a dead-ringer for Grace Kelly. Still, she nails it.

Throw these chicks into a Real Housewives framework and here are some highlights of the first season.

  • Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother and Snow White’s stepmother form an early alliance. They were inseparable once they discovered their shared appreciation of the value of good men – those who will accept a command to dispose of innocent children deep in the forest.
  • Cinderella’s stepmother attributes Cinderella’s success, and her bio-daughters’ unrelenting spinsterhood, to the ability to fit into a very specific glass slipper. Her Real Housewife commentary relentlessly returns to shoe discussions, yet she’s not quite Adrienne Maloof enough in the RH franchise  to launch her own shoe line.  She  lobbies the producers to get Sarah-Jessica Parker to make a guest appearance on the show. She has the hang of online shopping and develops an unhealthy obsession for the purchase of Jimmy Choos in three sizes. The other gals stage an intervention in her lounge room amidst towers and towers of shoe boxes. Cinderella’s stepmother signs on for a guest role in Hoarders.
  • Maria Von Trapp schools Hansel and Gretel’s mother with two great reasons why she didn’t need to kick her stepkids out into the forest and subject them to the woman in a house built of carbs:
    • Yes, they are a couple of extra mouths to feed, but the savings inherent in recycling curtains into outfits will go a long way towards covering the food bill.
    • Finding a marketable skill (in her case the Von Trapp Singers) opens up countless opportunities to monetise your offspring. Maria alludes very subtly to the modern day version – Kris Jenner pimping Kim Kardashian’s early video work.
  • Snow White’s stepmama is initially buoyed by the successful launch of her new raw food restaurant, devilishly named ‘The Poisoned Apple’, with a quirkily ironic red-carpet appearance by Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter and an organic Rosé-fountain.  Now single,  she struggles with Tinder due to trust issues engendered by the huntsman not doing his duty way back when.  She also suffers from Imposter Syndrome and feels she has betrayed the wicked stepmother sisterhood based on her inability to kill Snow White with any of a suffocating bodice, poisoned comb or tainted apple.

In a get-together fuelled by Margaritas these gals lock in another season and vote in Stepmama#5.

Leann Rimes.

 

 

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The Deal With The Biological Bond

Having never had children, you will be unable to comprehend the apparently limitless love, that allegedly heart-expanding level of consciousness that a biological mother has for her child. It seems to be something more epic than James Cameron’s version of the Titanic, an indescribable thing espoused by generations of women oozing maternal contentment. It has spawned a million hashtags, not the least of which is the execrable #blessed.

I’ve had some of my most simply sublime moments watching Netflix with a sauv blanc and a snoozy cat  – yet these are apparently not on par with the emotion between mother and child.

This blissful bond is the payoff offered by Mother Nature for the ordeal that is represented by pregnancy and birth. The payoff NEEDS to be sublime. To be prepared to have your own child is to knowingly go into a scenario where you will have a blood–and-scuzz-covered infant extracted either:

  1. Through a gaping scalpel wound that will render you virtually immobile for several weeks and possibly unwilling to ever wear a bikini or contemplate a plank position at the gym, or
  2. In a manner which has been successfully negotiated for thousands of years but still seems frankly barbaric, and will likely involve stitches where stitches should never be.

Biological mothers prove themselves willing to go through this ordeal and many other unmentionable symptoms:

  • Daily projectile vomiting that you can’t comprehend without recalling that late-teen experimental phase fuelled by cheap wine coolers.
  • Helplessly observing bulging silvery stretch marks etch themselves permanently on a previously taut stomach.
  • The indignity of wearing elasticised everything.

Even celebs who appear genetically blessed with talent or gorgeousness suffer along with the mere mortals:

“I just started calling myself ‘Swamp Ass.’ Like, I have swamp ass right now. I had major swamp ass because I was wearing these Spanx to hold in my gut … It’s like the bayou up in that region” – Jessica Simpson

Although the connection between this and Spanx is brow-furrowing at best, it’s fair to say that no-one has ever celebrated a moist, swampy, inner bayou.

“When I got pregnant, I had so much testosterone in me that I grew a beard. I only cropped it last night. It’s actually true. I’m not telling a joke. I actually have a beard, but I’m proud of it. I call it Larry.” – Adele

As if we are not already obsessed about hair removal.

“When I was pregnant, I just wanted to get lots and lots of animals, for some reason. We talked about cats but David said absolutely not” – Victoria Beckham

I venture to say that Victoria would have been a more cheerful woman if she’d been successful in getting all the cats.

‘The pregnancy, I wouldn’t really wish that upon anyone. Anyone. It’s all worth it in the end, so I would definitely suffer through that, but pregnancy was not a good experience for me. At all.’ – Kim Kardashian.

About as real as you can get from a Kardashian.

The only one that appeared to breeze through it?

‘I sometimes forget I am pregnant’ – Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge

Spoken by someone whose pregnant belly looks like nothing more than me after a reckless night of beer and bolognaise.

All this, and more, means that women who give birth totally deserve the hormonal payoff that appears to be generated as soon as they lay eyes on the squalling infant.

The reverse is also true. If you are unwilling to go through all of the above to generate your own child and merely acquire one as a result of dating a dad, you simply cannot expect to feel the biological bond that results from sharing a large chunk of DNA with another miniature person.

The only thing that you did to deserve having a child thrust into your life was to fail to declare offspring as a deal-breaker on your online dating profile.

So the fact that you have not created this small human through blood, sweat, tears and the sacrifice of your pelvic floor means you don’t earn the biological bond. The sooner you realise this the better.

What you need to know is that regardless of any investment in swamp-ass, you have the potential to regard with extreme fondness this youngster who shares some DNA with someone you are actually crazy about.

 

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Camping. Another stepfamily adventure

Recently I chalked up another chapter in the #dontrecognisemylife story of my new blended family.

Camping.

Before every person that knows me rejects this as an elaborate and completely preposterous fabrication dreamed up to plug a rather large void between blog posts, let me clarify that it was GLAMPING. A spacious tent, erected by those who actually possess the required expertise. Quality manchester. Soft furnishings. Carefully curated decorative touches. Hot water bottles snugly encased in something hand-knitted. Sufficient power to support hair appliances, multi-device charging, bedside lamps and HEATING!

It’s taken a long time for creative entrepreneurs to carve out a niche variation on standard canvas-based hospitality that is sufficiently evolved to tempt me back into camping life. My last foray into this world was three decades ago, where I joined like-minded 18 year old friends, newly emancipated from our parents by virtue of freshly-issued drivers licences and ready to spend supermarket-checkout-wages on a cheap campsite. The concept of a share-economy was decades away from becoming a thing, but we were all well aware of the outrageous value represented by a flagon of Para Port when divided between a gaggle of inexperienced drinkers. Fueled by abundant, cheap fortified spirits and Midnight Oil albums on repeat, memories were made.

And now we have glamping.

Just as I learned in the 80s the limitations of an inexperienced liver at the hands of an unconstrained flow of cheap booze, I’ve now learned that communing with nature protected by only a thin veneer of canvas can continue to be a source  of life-lessons. Throw an energetic twelve year old stepchild into your tent and there’s an unexpected layer of nuance in the learnings. Here are a few of those lessons.

I am unsuited to confined spaces

I have a fairly lengthy list of life-skill limitations. These have compounded as I’ve matured. It began with a lack of control of my intestinal contents on fairground spinny rides and the inevitability of fairy floss attaching to my hair. Early career limitations involved an inability to speak to superiors without blushing, becoming unpredictably inarticulate or spraying them with incidental spittle.  For all the investment and earnest advice from Australia’s finest hardware stores I’ve remained inept at the most basic of DIY home-maintenance tasks. There were lessons gleaned from an emergency room visit and eight weeks in plaster  after I fell on the basketball court, not at the hands of a hard-tackling opponent, but by inexplicably falling while running down the sidelines without the ball or another human within twenty metres. The purchase of a wooden-based bed with merciless corners six years ago has still not trained me in the agility to avoid, on average, a bi-weekly new shin bruise.

Spending time in a tent, however,  has reaffirmed that in a confined space I operate with all the finesse of a graceless yak.

My first act, crushing a wineglass stem into forlorn shards with an errant ugg boot was something anyone could have done. I’m convinced glass breakage is something that the glamping purveyors fully expect and routinely budget for.

Something a little more advanced on the scale of camping carnage was my careless hand gesture that emptied a flower vase of water into the central powerboard and shut down the entire tent’s electricals.

You need low-fi games

I can’t explain how many different ways I tried to contingency-plan my way through the lack of wi-fi in a tent. Step-parenthood is similar to parenthood in that it teaches you the sheer horror that can result from a bored tween who is severed from their technology.

I did explain that tents don’t have wi-fi. That the people around you are rarely likely to offer up hackable private wi-fi. That even the combined efforts of our family mobile data usage plans would wither under the weight of what is required for a pre-teen to compete in whatever it is that they do in a bout of Fortnite. And also, there was no TV.

Having managed all expectations, we employed the best of low-data-usage apps to navigate those literally dark hours between sunset and a reasonable bedtime.

Strangely enough, entertainment can still ensue from traditional games like charades, even if the charade topic is now delivered by a $0.99 app rather than a cheeky little box of cards.

My skill level at such games is still entry-level. I was halfway to the answer –  knowing that the back end of the answer was ‘shark’. I regarded closely the stepchild vigorously pointing to a white chrysanthemum (now laying parched in its jar after all the water was drained in the powerboard spillage incident).

He was subtly trying to convey that the full answer was the Great White.

I responded confidently with that slightly less ubiquitous, yet equally fearsome creature of the sea – the Flower Shark.

Catering works differently

If you were embarking on a lengthy glamping stay, you’d either need a fairly limitless eating-out budget or some serious planning around camping-compatible meals.

For the sake of one night, I felt disinclined to invest in keeping Esky ice up to anything more perishable than a bottle of Rose. Given our proximity to Melbourne winter, I was also naturally averse to committing time in an outdoor BBQ and camp kitchen to conjure up dinner. Instead I determined that all meals would be outsourced. Whilst husband and stepchild huddled over an iPhone, trying to watch a soccer league final that I’d failed to factor into the entertainment contingency planning, I was relegated to hunter/gatherer status when it came to the evening meal.

My life skills failed me when it came to home delivery in the context of a specific camp site. I valiantly pushed past my menu app’s failure to recognise my current location and apply very persistent efforts to deliver me pizza from my regular local outlet some 150km away. I pondered whether the caravan park would enforce the rigorous algorithms I was used to in my CBD carparking world and fail to deal with letting another vehicle in with our access pin without our vehicle with that same access pin having exited and leaving us trapped with the delivery guy, huddled collectively around shared pizza on campsite 180 until daybreak.

So I stood, nonchalantly leaning against the caravan park reception veranda pillar, clad in camping-appropriate  hoodie and inside-tent Uggs, awaiting the pizza delivery guy. I was  on the verge of holding up an airport style sign saying ‘La Porchetta’ lest I be mistaken for a shoddily clad lady of the night trawling for camper rough trade.

Boys in tents

My last learning, which is not news to anyone who cohabitates closely with near-teen boys, is their prolific ability to transform pizza and Pepsi into toxic gaseous fumes that can easily engulf an unaccustomed stepmother. Having been blessed with a house with adequate ventilation and only populated by a child on an every-other-weekend basis, I was not accustomed to such concentrated fumes.

Having now been indoctrinated, I feel compelled to defend every methane-emitting bovine accused of being at the heart of global warming and advise them that they should lawyer up and start singing like a canary about their human teenage toxin-emitting accomplices.

Glamping. Just another source of (overly fragrant) blended family experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mother’s Day Survival Tips for the Childless Stepmother

If your ovaries have never fired up, not even when Ryan Gosling was looking to spawn offspring, then Mother’s Day means nothing other than a day to avoid eating out and being financially slaughtered by a sentimentally festive mark-up.

For the first year or two of being a step-parent, given your complete lack of parenting awareness, you won’t register anything on Mother’s Day other than the already-well-ingrained desire to honour your own mother.

After a while though, the cumulative effort you’ve invested in cooking, cleaning, driving your step-child to a million things, finding band-aids in emergencies and dealing with relentless laundry may trigger a prickle of annoyance at not receiving any skerrick of recognition on Mother’s Day.  It’s possible that you may feel a teensy bit overlooked (notwithstanding your immense gratitude at not having been through that whole childbirth process).

Here are some of the insights into Mother’s Day from actual Mamas to help you understand what you are really missing out on (or not).

The Breakfast

If you wanted cold toast, undrinkable coffee and eggs more rubbery than politician campaign promises, there is no need to yearn for a Mother’s day breakfast, you might simply take the Monday 6am on a domestic airline.

Every biological mother knows that, good intentions aside, the domestic ineptitude of a small child knows no bounds and that the chaos wrought in the kitchen on Mother’s Day is no way compensated by the delivery of a lukewarm meal to your bedside. Someone will undoubtedly fail to turn off the gas underneath the frypan after use, rendering egg-remnants into industrial grade concrete which can never be removed. You can only hope they didn’t use your Le Creuset.

The lack of fine motor skills renders most youngsters unable to control a two litre bottle of OJ, leaving a sticky lake on the kitchen bench.

The void of observational skill or general interest in your wellbeing on the part of a child means they won’t realise you gave up all caffeinated drinks five years ago and will result in your being served up dodgy Earl Grey tea from bags encrusted with pantry-crud and long past any reasonable expiry date.

The gifts

Mother’s Day gifts are a domestic version of the office Kris Kringle, in that they seem to be gifts chosen by someone who does not really know you.

When the children are at an age where they can only source their gifts from the school mother’s day stall, the haul is going to be constrained to cheap $2 gifts that have arrived in container-loads from mainland China.  But then, who doesn’t want:

  • A fridge-magnet-enabled shopping list so that you can be reminded of your overwhelming domestic responsibilities every time you do some hopeful foraging for wine or cheese
  • A miniature sewing kit which is just like every version that comes free in any reputable hotel room. Given busy women are likely to have a tendency to deal with fallen hems with double sided sticky tape or the application of a snappy little staple, they already know that life is too short to actually do mending.
  • A torch for your handbag
  • Tea-towels as substantial as filo pastry
  • Lavender sachets to place in your sock drawer to ensure your feet smell like Nana.

No Day off from being a mother

Notwithstanding the potential for breakfast in bed, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card for women on Mother’s Day.  Mothers know they are still going to be surrounded by humans and pets that need to be fed. If you are a working woman, Sunday remains one of the few days where there is a chance to make inroads into laundry or ironing.

Notwithstanding the event, Baby Mamas gain no relief from the Sunday night ritual of trying to find school clothes for the next day and dealing with Friday’s forgotten lunchbox remnants.

So, even though you might feel the stirrings of annoyance at doing a lot of the work of being a mother without all the Mother’s day glory, be reassured that you are not necessarily missing out on anything.

Survival tips

If, as a Stepmother with no kids of your own, you are feeling vaguely slighted by lack of recognition on Mother’s Day, here are some tips:

  1. By definition, the stepchildren are likely to be at their mother’s house, so pour yourself a glass of wine, rejoice in the absence of any school week prep and watch all the reality TV shows without having to share the remote.
  2. Eat whatever you want for breakfast, in bed, without the risk of stray egg yolk on your Egyptian cotton.
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Should You Accept Your Partner’s Ex’s Friend Request?

If you haven’t learned about the power that social media yields, for both good and evil, then take a moment to consider the following:

  • Has the combo of margaritas and tweeting ever served you well?
  • Do you ever feel anything other than a little bit creepy (and terribly fearful about accidently clicking ‘like’) when stalking your ex’s new girlfriend?
  • Have you ever woken up after a big night out without being just a bit nervous as you check FB for an account of what went down?

If you are answering no to any of these questions, and are in the early period of blending a family, now is probably not the right time to say yes to a Facebook friend request from your partner’s ex and mother of his children.  Here are some reasons why:

There are plenty of other ways to keep in touch

You may feel that this is a heart-warming way to share snippets of your blended family life, to ensure that no one misses out of those fleeting moments of family blessedness that occur at random and pretty much don’t exist unless they are captured on social media. However there are many other ways to preserve these moments rather than opening the current status and entire back catalogue of your life up to someone whose only tenuous connection to you is that they bore your partner’s child.

By all means capture the pics on your phone, but a perfectly legit alternative method of transmission is old-fashioned email or text message. Preferably originating from your husband.

You may be poking the bear of jealousy

Nothing will tear at a bio-mama’s heartstrings like their flesh and blood child cavorting happily through Disney-esque experiences with someone that they might consider masquerading as an alternative female parent. Regardless of the fact that you are very unlikely to have had any input into any boundary-setting, you will become automatically complicit in allowing their child to scarf down fairy floss, get involved in spinny rides and cart home showbags which will only serve to perpetuate their intake of trans-fats for days to come.

These are things that the bio-mama  would perhaps never personally allow. If so, this will engender an immediate conspiracy theory that you are slowly drawing their child over to a place where they would rather your company than hers.

You probably don’t need to invite a critique of your lifestyle

Your current lifestyle might be terribly bland by comparison to your 20s (and you might just be terribly relieved that social media wasn’t around then to capture it for posterity) but there will still be fodder that you wouldn’t want set forth as evidence of any shortcomings of yours as a parent.

For example, there is tremendous potential for an otherwise innocuous gathering of your besties over sparkling wine, tiaras and customised cupcakes at a live screening of a royal wedding to be misconstrued as a gathering of a coven of closet alcoholics using a monarchist rite of passage as cover for hedonistic overindulgence and immature disregard for healthy liver function.

As unlikely as it may seem, your stepchild’s mother may be a staunch Republican who believes that NO GOOD can come from you fully believing in, and potentially instilling princessy happy-every-afters into her daughter’s malleable psyche.

You may also think that you were lightning-swift in deleting that post of you and your posse indulging in what you all now agree were regrettable end-of-evening Tequila shots to mark the liberation of your pal from a lengthy and complicated divorce. What you must know is that these pics will land in the hands of the family court as legally discoverable proof of your inability to be appropriately respectful at the dissolution of a marriage and mature in your approach to consumption of concentrated white spirits. Neither of these matters bode well if you find yourself a party to the pursuit of a more aggressive custody arrangement.

There’s no easy way to backtrack

We’ve all been in those situations where an overly hasty acceptance of a friend request has proved to be a mistake. Given that online dating gifted us with the concept of ghosting, it is now ridiculously simple and socially acceptable to unfriend, block, delete and ignore all forms of digital communication without even resorting to an apprehended violence order. This is perfectly fine when it comes to someone with whom you were a little swipe-right-happy and in the cold light of day is revealed to be a bad choice. You can disappear into the interwebs like you never existed. They can open up Tinder again and move right along. Everybody wins.

It’s exponentially harder to apply ghosting principles to someone who is sharing a child with your significant other and will continue doing so. Pretty much forever. There are far too many clicks involved to claim you did it accidently and far too many shared drop-off events for you to try to explain it away.

Far easier to ignore the friend request, whilst airily claiming that you simply ‘don’t do social media’ – whilst immediately doing a serious double-check of your privacy settings.

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From Sex And The City to Stepmother

There’s a pivotal moment in your online dating experience where your cursor hovers over the ‘children’ question.  To click the ‘no’ option is to exclude any male with a child, and if you are in your 40s, probably reduce the pool of matches to something like the number of people you’ll see in a lineup at your local takeaway food shop when you are picking up your Friday night noodles for one.

Flippantly clicking the ‘I don’t want any, but yours are ok’ doesn’t seem like a big deal.  Statistically, the male is unlikely to be a solo parent with full custody, which means kid-free windows, and if they spawned whilst very young, the offspring may be a well adjusted 20-something, who might turn out to be like a cool younger brother. So you click it, and then wait for your laptop to instinctively shriek an alarm greater in decibels than the combined female audience at a One Direction concert.  It doesn’t. You wait to see if it triggers a pop-up box offering up the latest iteration of Crocs as a sign that you are on a path that is incongruous with every molecule of your being.  It doesn’t.   You log off leaving a rather large floodgate wedged right open and head off for a glass of something sparkling.

Something happens.  You meet a dad,  things go riotously well, and nary a thought is given to the prospect of the miniature humans lurking in the shadows.  Next minute, you are on track for a whole new universe of life lessons, even after you thought that grasping the perils of drinking and tweeting meant you already knew everything you needed to know.  Here are three key truths that will shortly become devastatingly obvious.

Its not about you anymore

Biological mothers  know this.  They aren’t born with this insight, but that’s the reason why Mother Nature invokes a nine month pregnancy window, where suddenly something that feels vaguely parasitic takes up residence inside you, jostling your internal organs, controlling everything about what you eat, how you sleep, denying you the consumption  of soft cheeses, causing involuntary daily expulsion of your stomach contents and dictating the wearing of flat shoes.  If you didn’t understand that your life was no longer your own, once this period is up your body will literally turn itself inside out trying to expel the small being and nothing will ever quite go back in its rightful place again.  This is followed by a period of sleep deprivation so insidious that Guantanamo Bay is trying to clone the process. Eventually this just eases back to a general loss of every element of freedom and spontaneity you once had.

If you acquire a small human late in life, without going through this rite of passage to get there, you have no framework available to deal with it.   You will realise very quickly that you are no longer the princess, the focal point for all attention and the consensus is that it’s a little like being left on the side of the road while the family drive off in the car.

It appears that this is why, universally, if you hadn’t already, you will take up drinking wine.

You will need to come to grips with the S-word

Take a moment, have a cup of tea or a glass of something chilled and try to cite a positive example of a stepmother. Trawl the depths of your Disney experience and your entire back-catalog of fairy tales and you will not find one instance of a glamorous, fabulous and much-revered stepmother.  Not a one.

If you’ve shacked up with a rockstar some twenty years your senior, you can try to pass yourself off as a sibling of the child, but if you can’t pull this one off, at some point someone in the street is going to pass comment on the child you are with and you are going to stumble when trying to describe that you are not their mother.  It hardly trips off the tongue to describe yourself as ‘little Robbie’s dad’s girlfriend’ or even worse ‘partner’.  If you don’t elaborate that you are not the child’s mother, the laws of early childhood karma will kick in. He/she will pick that moment to pull a full scale tantrum and you’ll want to step back and point out that you share NO genetic material and had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the upbringing of this child, save for plying them with a few Freddo frogs and Chicken nuggets over the last couple of months.

Even if you think you will never feel comfortable referring to yourself in this way, you are going to have to use the word stepmother at least descriptively. My recommendation? Embrace the term and make it your life’s mission to band together with others to create a critical mass of glamorous, kind and supremely fabulous stepmothers so that in several hundred years the Disney version becomes urban myth.

You have a whole new level of ineptitude

You know nothing about this caper.  You may have sued corporations, saved lives and run multi million dollar deals, but you don’t know anything about raising children and even if you did, you have no role to play as you are not a parent.

What you will inevitably do is overcompensate, spoil the kiddie rotten, indulge a little in all the things you liked as a kid and eventually assemble some degree of life skill.

If you don’t, Google can tell you pretty much all you need to know.

 

Just when you think you are not cut out for this craziness,  there is a moment when it all turns around.  It could be something as simple as you nailing a skerrick of respect as the Uno Queen of the household. It might be the day that you actually appear in one of the fridge-paintings, albeit trailing a sorry last behind the pet dog, the next door neighbour’s turtle and the kitchen windowsill Venus flytrap plant …and the kid has drawn you in a manner that adds a few kgs.

 

But hey….you made it……