New leadership in the U.S. is a welcome blend
Step right up … stepmothers!
If anything was being inaugurated this past Wednesday, it was not merely a prez, but also a billowy new era of blended families.
The first family of Bidens is famously one, of course, with Jill Biden at its centre, ever since she married widower Joe after his first wife was tragically killed in a car crash (along with another child of theirs) decades ago. “She put us back together,” the now-president once said of Jill, remarking on how she took on the role of raising his remaining two sons, while giving him an additional daughter. “She gave me back my life. She gave us back a family.”
Ready for their close-up, too, during the hoopla on Jan. 20? The kaleidoscope of faces that make up the Kamala Harris clan. When the first female vice-president of the United States wed lawyer Doug Emhoff some years back, she inherited his two children, too, from a previous marriage — Ella and Cole (named, yup, after Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter, because Doug is a jazz buff ) — in the process threading together a brood that is now Jewish, Black and South Asian. Famously, those two 20-somethings call her “Momala” and their real mom, documentarian Kerstin Emhoff, even campaigned for Kamala, Instagramming up a storm around the time of the election.
“We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional,” the Veep once said.
A pretty far cry from the way stepmothers have been cast in pop culture since time immemorial. Those convenient monsters. Those replacement bots.
From Cinderella to Tolstoy, from “The Parent Trap” to, well, “Stepmom” (the Julia Roberts/Susan Sarandon flick), the messaging has been consistent: “Whenever fiction needs a character to pin it on, a stepmother comes in handy. Euripides didn’t help our cause … and it’s pretty much been that way since, with stepmothers pitted, in the main, against their stepdaughters, to create stories of two women battling for one man’s attention,” as writer Sam Baker, who once wrote a book on the subject, has put it.
Let’s not forget Snow White. The OG evil queen, she famously kicks her stepdaughter out of the castle in the company of a woodsman tasked to cut out her heart, doubling down by trying to finish her off with a poisoned apple. Crunch.
One of the messiest stepmom-stepkid dances in real life? That would be the one between Jackie O and Christina Onassis, daughter of her second flush husband, Ari. Rivers of ink were once devoted to their rancour.
Princess Diana famously had one, too. Remember? While every crack of her relationship with Charles has been pored over — both during life and even in death, as the latest season of “The Crown” showed — it was not the first rickety relationship in her life: The first being her father’s marriage to socialite Raine Spencer. She arrived in Diana’s life when the latter was 14. It wasn’t pretty.
With neither she nor her three siblings being all too receptive — they referred to her as “Acid Raine” — it all hit a new low, allegedly, with Raine’s decision to redecorate the family estate, Althorp. Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, famously described her interior taste by saying that her choices had “the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco.” (Oh my.)
And yet, at some point in the five years before Diana’s death in 1997, Diana and Raine came to an understanding. What goes around comes around? Possibly. A year before her own death, in 2015, Raine gave an interview, in which she described her relationship with one of the world’s most famous women, thusly: “She had incredibly heavy pressures put upon her, but we ended up huge friends. She used to come and sit on my sofa and tell me her troubles. I’m very happy about that.”
Likewise: The late Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, whose father famously ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, in what was one of the biggest scandals of the 20th century. Staying friendly with La Liz for her whole life, Fisher was fond of saying, “If my father had to divorce my mother for anyone, I’m so grateful that it was Elizabeth.”
The state of stepmommery these days is, in most cases, a less combative zone. There is, for instance, Jennifer Lopez, whose own block is now happily made of up the two daughters her fiancé, Alex Rodriguez, brings, plus of course her own twins from a previous marriage. See: Katy Perry, who is all in as stepmom to Flynn, the son whom her husband-to-be Orlando Bloom shares with supermodel Miranda Kerr. Exhibit A: Hilaria Baldwin who, even with all the hot water she got into recently with the tabloids, found herself being vigorously defended by her own stepdaughter, Ireland Baldwin (mom is Kim Basinger).
This is the cultural space in which both Kamala and Jill — two stepmothers for the price of one — find themselves. It is not the first time we have had such figures in the upper echelons of D.C. life, to be clear, but in both the cases of Nancy Reagan and, more recently, Melania Trump, the stepmother role always seemed to be more pro forma than anything else. Distant, at best. Nancy, for one — who famously had strained relationships with even her own children — admitted this in her memoir, “My Turn”: “All of them (the children) have felt at one time or another that Ronnie and I were so devoted to each other that there wasn’t room for them in our affections, and that they were sometimes left out.”
In a world where multi-hyphenate families are increasingly the norm — some 40 per cent of families are said to have some step-situation — that both the first lady and the vice-president are stepmothers, and happy warriors in their roles, is no paltry thing. Blend well. Blend often.