Tag: stepmother questions

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The Rookie Stepmother’s Guide to the Nacho Method

Skulk around Facebook Stepmother groups for long enough and you’ll likely encounter a very simple hashtag, usually in response to a very complex stepfamily scenario.

#nacho

It’s not about the soothing balm of corn chips awash in salsa and mozzarella in the face of a life challenge. Much as this concoction might have served you well as the perfect couch-snack in the face of heartache, buoyed by its natural life-partner Tequila, Stepmotherly nacho has nothing to do with a convenient Tex-Mex treat.

Simply put, the philosophy is ‘Nacho Kids. Nacho Problem’.

Underlying principles include:

Reminding everyone involved that this is not actually your child

This allows you to extract yourself from some of the more onerous responsibilities including:

  • Finding AWOL sports uniform components in the last 10 minutes before commencement of said sport
  • Taking responsibility for the craft project the night before the craft project is due when you are in fact the least crafty person you know
  • Trying to patrol gaming hours and screen time
  • Adjusting your entire household’s dietary patterns when the child decides to be a pescetarian

This also means you can treat the stepchild as if they were the child of a friend, or of a sibling. This allows you to dabble at will in their lives, taking them to movies you are keen on, on spinny rides at an amusement park or filling them with simple sugars then relinquishing all subsequent responsibilities.

Refraining from expressing criticism about the stepchild

Stepping back in this fashion involves being less invested in expressing your suggestions about how this child might behave in order to best position themselves as a valued contributor to society. This is useful in two ways:

  • Your suggestions are very unlikely to ever be acknowledged. In a world already full of frustrations like ineffective public transport, talentless social media influencers who earn four times what you do and those people who block your access to the deli number dispenser by taking their ticket and not moving, you hardly need to expend energy on an opinion that will be ignored by a child.
  • If you, as I do, often lack an appropriate level of filtering when it comes to expressing your opinion to a loved one about their first-born child, it will be useful to retrain yourself to say nothing. I’ve learned that comments such as ‘I feel like you are just facilitating his path to mediocrity’ or ‘don’t let him end up being the person I’d put on a Performance Improvement Plan’ in retrospect would have been better left as ‘inside thoughts’ rather than those that came out aloud.

Understand your triggers, and don’t engage

As the ultimate nerd-child who was driven to academic pursuits, my head wants to actually explode at the concept that a child would not complete their homework and hand it in.

As the daughter of a nurse who only accepted projectile vomiting and / or febrile seizures as a reason to stay home from school, I’m sorely triggered by someone who expects to stay home from school due to a sore stomach (which seems suspiciously proximate to eating 500g of Cheetos)

The Nacho method involves understanding that this is not about you and your triggers.

Step back from the chaos

Unless there has been an unseemly tiny period between your partner disconnecting with their ex and your coupling, they’ve been perfectly able to manage all the twin-household carnage without you. Patterns have been established. Boundaries, regardless of how porous, exist. Feeding, housing, educating and most of Maslow’s priorities were maintained before you rocked up.

Even if you have, as almost every rookie does, inserted yourself enthusiastically in the everyday of this fractured household in an earnest attempt to make everyone feel whole, if you now take a stiletto-step back, no one is going to keel over.

If you are writhing in angst over unfair distribution of household tasks, if the hashtag of your life has become #ididntsignupforthis, it’s not too late to politely retreat a little.

Have no involvement with your partner’s ex

Enough said.

Whether its a 1am snack to soak up a tummy full of sauv blanc or a legit strategy for stepfamily sanity, its always OK to embrace the nacho.

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3 Things You Shouldn’t Say to a Stepmother

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?’