Tag: childless stepmother

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Three Traits You Need As A Rookie Stepmother

Given the stubborn failure of even a skerrick of maternal instinct to kick in at any stage during my child-bearing years, the prospect of inheriting a child as the steak knives of shacking up with a Dad caused me to wonder what essential life experience I lacked as a result of not having brought one of my own into the world.

Thankfully, the role of stepmother has less breadth than full-blown parenthood. Even more thankfully, most of the essential attributes for the rookie stepmother were actually part of my experience, despite not having gained them through bio-kid-rearing. Here are the top three:

Care of a small being

I may not have a great track record when it comes to the care of living things. I had a regrettable experience with the baby lovebird for which I had custody as part of a high school science assignment. To be fair, the bird required four-hourly hand feeding and my only misstep was to sleep through what must have been one of the more pivotal ones timed in the wee hours. The back-room post mortem performed by my biology teacher confirmed neglect as the cause of death and although I was able to rescue my grades by pairing up with a more responsible student, it probably contributed to the perception that I lacked the requisite skills to shepherd a child successfully from foetus to functioning adult.

Apart from this rookie error, I do in fact have a fairly consistent history of caring for small beings. Herbie the guinea pig thrived in my care, kept as he was in frequently cleaned housing, dining on balanced diet of fresh carrots and a an assortment of grains, and patiently enduring dress-ups. To be perfectly honest, his ability to thrive was probably based on the rampant amount of procreating he did with his soul-mate Fluffy, producing litter after litter of babies and cementing his lineage in suburban domestic rodent history.

I’ve also proven adept at ensuring the long life of more than one domestic cat – one of ordinary moggy breeding and even temperament and one pedigreed
tortoiseshell Persian . The latter lived for nearly eighteen years off the joy of terrorising all visitors and shedding long fur that clung very persistently to every carpeted surface and taunted those with sensitive nasal passages. Although I yearned for her affection, Sophie only loved one person in her life and it was not me.

So I did not need a small human to teach me the importance of feeding and nurturing. Fruitless pursuit of affection from a distant feline was perfectly adequate as to train me in the harsh reality of living with a stepchild not genetically obligated to return my affection.

Patience

I was not initially known for my innate patience. Midway through my career the universe recognised that this was not going to be resolved for me by the birthing and raising of small children and sought instead to gift me with a long stint working in Japan. Many will visualise Tokyo as an insanely overpopulated city that appears to vomit neon and is in a perpetually trembling state perched as it is on the combo of a subterranean network of rumbling trains and a major seismic fault-line. In reality it is driven by both ancient customs and modern norms that SLOW EVERYTHING DOWN. You only need to observe the tortuous process by which Mr Miyagi trains a young Daniel in the nuances of martial arts or the languorous coma-like procession of events in the movie Lost In Translation.

Being sent to a country to untangle complicated computer system implementations that appeared to have stalled a long way away from realising a single logon was the ultimate exercise in teaching patience. With a Japanese vocab that leaned more towards Midori and Sushi than the concepts required to unwind the actions of large project teams, the entire trouble-shooting exercise was conducted through an overwrought interpreter.  I could count the heartbeats of my draining lifeforce while a large committee conducted robust and lengthy dialog, accompanied by vigorous gesticulation before allowing my interpreter to respond back to my question with a simple ‘No.’

So I am generally unblinking in the face of the inordinate amount of time it takes to leave the house as a family, the torture involved in locating an elusive pair of shoes or the unfathomable need to perpetually find a bike pump given every item of inflatable sporting equipment appears to defiantly deflate when it enters our household.

Diplomacy

A corporate consulting career that involved trying to help companies navigate their way out of an IT environment laid waste by neglect or through a business process transformation that is far more ambitious than its current level of capability, is built on providing advice cloaked in a level of diplomacy. There’s a subtle art to helping a corporation move on from a lack of foresight or some clunky decision making and focus on the future. You may feel like an entire middle level of management needs to be sat down and given a good-and-shouty verbal shellacking but you will be required to provide advice couched in terms of ‘evolving the culture’ and ‘making step-change’. It’s only appropriate to suppress the instinctive level of outright scorn that demands to be leveled at corporation run by a rampant dictator or whose entire decision making capability hangs off a sketchy web of excel spreadsheets only understood by one person in the joint.

So step-life diplomacy was just another day in the office. It was initially challenging to find a way to respect ill-defined, porous boundaries when it came to my role in parenting, to remain unblinking in the face of new norms that appeared to defy all tenets of civilised behaviour and to navigate blatantly illogical arguments when they came from the other side of the custodial parent divide. The strategies of 1) never responding out loud with the first reaction that came to mind and 2) liberal use of wine as an aid to reflection on the day’s events proved as useful in stepmother life as they did among corporate mayhem.

Hang in there, you’ve already got all the skills.

You don’t have to have borne kids of your own to nail this.

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Managing Blended Family Finances (ie hands off my shoe budget!)

Dollar Sign isolated on white background. 3D render

If food fights and first sleepovers weren’t enough, the freight train of stepmother firsts is about to bring a new flavour of normal your way.

Finances.

Specifically, shared finances. Melded finances started off simple back in the day where all you were trying to do was merge funds as a kid-free couple in your early 20s. This era probably felt very straightforward if you had refrained from diving into a mortgage or cultivating a care factor over retirement funds.

Fast forward a bunch of years and if you’ve still maintained a budget that is not impeded by the need to keep any small humans alive, you’ve probably become nicely settled into being the queen of your financial domain. If you want to pay half the GDP of a small nation to spend some quality time at a silent yoga retreat to eat and sleep like a peasant and refrain from all verbal interactions then there’s no one around to judge you.

If you shack up with a stepdad, you are buying into a complex financial world – one where all the might of the family law court, the child support agency and the tax office are king. Get used to it, the elephant in the room that is the child support calculation and it’s minions that manage the collection of school fees, books and uniforms are going to be putting their grubby feet on your furniture for as many years as it takes to marry this guy’s kids off.

Even if you get a handle on what these grabby chaps are going to shave off your shoe budget, there’s a bunch of sneaky little overheads inherent in managing a family of kidlets. Like food. Like clothing.

To top it all off, if there’s child support involved, and there almost always is unless the ex is no longer of this world, or is in jail, then you are going to watch dollars that ordinarily would have greased the wheels of your household head over to hers. Repeatedly. 

These financial shenanigans are going to surround you for a while, so you need to understand this whole get-up and have a strategy to deal. Here’s some advice.

Kids are expensive

If you are a parent already, you know all this, so skip to the next section so you can preserve some energy to dwell darkly on how child support is spent. If not, read on and know this:

Food. Kids prefer highly processed foods. This means you are not just paying for whatever original food item may have existed in the general area of a fruit roll-up, but all the rolling, extracting and packaging equipment that has been involved since, not to mention the R&D spend on genetic modification that may be secreted deeply in its past. A simple plate of pear quadrants whilst cheaper and more recognisable to Mother Nature, is excruciatingly unpalatable to a 4-year-old.

Clothes. Kids relentlessly grow out of their wardrobes and are immune to any conversation about buying cheap versions based on the solid formula of cost-per-wear that you’ve personally used to justify ‘classic’ and ‘vintage’ purchases for about the last twenty years. Those swooshy Nikes are going to be on that kid for about seven outings, but don’t even suggest that they be clad in Dunlop Volleys till their feet stop growing. If they don’t grow out of them, they’ll lose them. Losing elements of a school uniform is a special kid art form. I’ve developed a dark conspiracy that the lost property office at a primary school is a complete myth and, under cover of darkness, they secretly launder (literally and figuratively) items back into the local suburban uniform store where you’ll buy them again to replace the lost item.

If they are not lost at school they’ll be lost in that Bermuda Triangle that always exists between split parent households where neither party’s willingness to admit culpability means the most Mexican of standoffs will result when it comes to replacement.

Don’t think about how the child support is being spent

Watching child support dollars flow like unstoppable lava into another household is relentlessly disconcerting, and something you’ll be ill-prepared for unless you’ve had the experience of investing in 1980s timeshare holidays or early 2000s agribusiness.

My friends, in this case, you need to make like Elsa and just let it go.

Do not try to determine what child support is intended to cover, in an effort to see if it absolves your household income from items such as school fees or uniforms. You will lose what remains of your Netflix-binge-ravaged eyesight if you try to find guidelines on this topic on any government website.

Do not internally or overtly make any observation on how your household’s contribution to the child’s mother appears to be funding her expensive high maintenance balayage hair colour, intricate tattoo collection or new boyfriend’s desire to make his garage band the next Nirvana. Nothing good can come of you comparing your now-budget summer holiday in a wonky floored, grease-and-despair scented cabin in a caravan park awash with grubby 10 year olds to her newly subsidised trips to Hawaii complete with infinity pool and kids club. For every mother who seems to be rorting the child support system there are ten others that need every last dollar that your household is providing.

Just let the funds go forth with good grace (and the knowledge that child support law makes it non-negotiable anyway) and know that one day this too will pass.

Maybe help get the kid a job at Maccas so that day that it passes might come sooner.

An option – contribute nothing except your own share.

This would appear to be a perfectly valid strategy for several reasons. Let’s start with the obvious –  this crazy little village had its own functioning financial eco-system before you existed and it survived just fine.  It was feeding, housing and clothing itself as either a single unit or a split household well before you came on the scene. Through some terrified 3am research in one of those early dad-dating days I established that (at least in my jurisdiction) the child support overlords don’t look at the new chick on the block as a contributor either.

It does get a tiny bit tough though if you are spreadsheeting within an inch of your life just to prove that your contribution is entirely fair based on your personal consumption of utilities, fridge space and internet data. If this means that your partner’s income dissipates to a level that leaves him drinking instant coffee and taking homebrand ramen to work for lunch while you drink $60 bottles of rose and engage a personal Pilates instructor then you might have missed the whole point of a true domestic partnership.

You might want to strike a balance where you’ll possibly contribute more to the household than you would if no children existed in it, but allows for greater human dignity and equality (and perhaps a greater likelihood that occasions might be marked by little sparkly trinkets from your partner from time to time)

Above all? Its only money. This whole shindig is likely to cost you less than the single-girl-sauvignon blanc savaging of your liver that was the status quo before you dated a dad.

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The First Sleepover: A Childless Stepmother’s Guide

That honeymoon period with a new love is a blissful time. You are likely rocking your best-ever body courtesy of the divorce diet and that phase of unfamiliarity that stops you scarfing carbs in plain view of your new partner.  Everything is new, nothing is niggly and you are only one step short of having Snow White’s best life, surrounded by helpful woodland creatures and indulging in tuneful duets with baby birds.

You may have even met your potential stepchildren, and if its early days, spent time indulging in an array of joyous kiddie activities, with only the tiniest shot of vodka to take the edge of the meeting-the-kid nerves.

The point at which it becomes a whole new ballgame, or in fact a whole new ballpark, is the first sleepover where the stepkiddies are involved. Here are some tips.

Leave it for as long as possible

Have as many kid-free sleepovers as you like. This is something to be encouraged and practically mandatory in case the white-hot early days of a romance flames out, revealing a certain shallowness or long-term incompatibility amongst its smoking ashes. You want to know this before you share a sleepover with kiddies. If this is another relationship that will be rendered to the Nope File, you do not want to have been unnecessarily exposed to the wayward spitting involved in junior bedtime teeth brushing rituals or been anywhere remotely within the vicinity of an awkward bedwetting phase.

If you aren’t yet ready to commit to being friends on Facebook, give the stepkid sleepover the swerve.

Consider your attire

Sleepwear for the first blended sleepover requires some careful thought.

If you’ve made it through the worst of your singledom heartache, then you’ve likely buried every item of sleepwear that was the equivalent of comfort food during your periods of darkest despair. The polarfleece bathrobe that kept you alive while your bloodflow tried to warm the daggers of ice where your heart used to be. The forgiving snuggie that accommodated that period of time on the couch where you lived off Netflix and sauv blanc, helpfully providing oversized pockets for stashing snacks that were reassuring in their sky-high percentage of saturated fats. The tracksuit that sheltered you from the cold hell of sleeping alone, then conveniently doubled as daywear.

If you’ve carved out a #revengebody through a diet of clear spirits and tears during your being-single phase, you’ve likely revitalised your bedroom wardrobe by rocketing to the VIP list on Victoria’s Secret. You’ve purchased garments of immense fragility at a gigantic cost per gram of fabric which now make you look all shimmery and svelte.

These are not the outfits for the first sleepover where children are present. You do not want to greet a child in a hallway in something skimpy, since these nuggets of childhood experience are invariably the first to be conveyed in graphic detail to the biological mother. As fab as you might feel, all juiced up on early-days oxytocin, you do not want to make a teenage step-kid feel like they have woken up in the playboy mansion.

The desirable state is somewhere vaguely in between. Leave the French lace at home, but equally don’t try to rescusitate your despair-encrusted snuggie. Go for some respectable PJs with good coverage, skipping flannelette versions involving cartoon characters if you fear regressing into frumpsville.

Talk about the arrangements

As pedestrian as it may seem, it’s very wise to have a pretty frank discussion about the bedtime rituals that are about to unfold. Shared time between two households and a desire on the part of a split bio parent to appease a child can make for some fairly loose bedtime boundaries.

You want to know if there is a tendency towards night terrors that is going to cause you to wake suddenly to unearthly screams.  It’s worth knowing that there will be a full-blown tanty involved as toothbrushing time looms. You need to know if there is a well-established door-knocking protocol or if a kiddie could just bust into the bedroom without warning.

From personal experience, you absolutely need to know  that a six year old will shimmy into a pair of pull-ups and plant himself on your side of the bed, given that’s been the way this household has rolled since the split. You need to have a strategy in advance for that one.

Don’t be setting any breakfast precedents

During the first sleepover event, aim to be a background person. Now is not the time to indulge any long-repressed desire to be a Gwyneth-style earth mother. Regardless of your horror at the dietary damage being wrought on a miniature human, do NOT try to wrest the box of Coco-pops from their grasp and aim to explain the virtues of a green smoothie. If you are truly determined to create a nutritionally balanced haven in the wasteland of Disney-dad indulgence, it’s a game of stealth and subtlety and a long game at that. It’s not something that you should leap into immediately after the first overnighter.

Don’t try to demonstrate your extensive research into the realm of the mummy blogger and make buttermilk pancakes complete with human features in the form of blueberry eyes and a smeary raspberry coulis mouth. If it turns out well, you’ve created a precedent that you will needed to replicate, which will become immensely tedious. If it goes awry, you’ll have created something that invokes that particular child’s fear of clowns.

Don’t expect that the child has the first clue about the joy of a bircher muesli involving steel-cut oats that have meditatively bathed overnight in organic cloudy apple juice. That is like sharing a glass of fabulous prosecco with a cask-wine drinker – unmitigated wastage.

Be prepared to just roll with the brekky traditions that already exist.

Save your energy for the battle to ensure your side of the bed remains free of small humans that are yet to master full continence.

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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……