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.