The bittersweet truth of being a stepmother
Excluded from family dinners. An ex-wife in the house. And loving three children who’ll never be yours. One woman reveals . . .
He’s very complicated you know,’ warned Carlo, the friend who introduced me to my husband, Bernardo. ‘He has hundreds of children and wives. Don’t get involved. Avoid at all costs.’ I was a single, 39-year-old writer on a year’s sabbatical from my stressful life as a magazine editor in London. I had landed in Florence by mistake and, falling in love with the Italian lifestyle, decided to stay the year.
I was writing a book and dating perfidious Florentine men, one of whom had recently broken my heart. so, not really looking for a serious relationship, I didn’t heed Carlo’s warning and started dating Bernardo regardless.
What did his hundreds of children and wives have to do with me,I reasoned. I just wanted a fun date to escort me round town.
Bernardo has three children — a situation that’s not so weird to encounter when you are dating in your late 30s.
But here’s where it did get complicated: Bernardo has not one but two ex-wives and when I first met him a decade ago, his eldest child, his teenage son, lived with him full-time while the daughters, aged five and six, lived with their mother and came to stay every other weekend — he was a double divorcee at 47, and a single father to boot.
And yet, in contrast to his complicated family situation, he was the most straightforward man I had met: open, honest and mature.
so, ignoring my friend’s warning, I did get involved — and here we are, just married last year after a decade of sharing a home, our lives and those complicated childcare arrangements.
According to research, one in three of us is involved in a stepfamily situation. Many of us are embarking on relationships that come with a ready-made family and all its attendant joys and pains.
It’s so common that it has its own millennial buzzword — ‘blended family’ is what we prefer to call these arrangements now, stepfamilies being so passé (and, more to the point, often not adequate for describing the mix of half-siblings and step-siblings and even steps left over from a previous relationship).
Thoroughly modern it may be, but no hip monikers can take away the primal realities of a situation that, however common, is nonetheless tricky at best. The inescapable truth is that when you get involved with someone who is already a parent, it’s never just the two of you in the relationship for long. Forget Princess Diana’s famous ‘there were three of us in this marriage’, I had a small army populating mine.
With three children and two ex-wives, there were a lot of people in my relationship — and often my kitchen. Bernardo’s son was 15 when we got together and, rather than him going to his mother’s, she came to visit him for one afternoon a week and the occasional weekend. Quite why I never understood, but I didn’t question the arrangement — it wasn’t my business.
The start of a new relationship, that cocooning time in which couples get to know each other and establish their intimacy, was, for Bernardo and me marked by the daily school run for his son, the presence of his first ex-wife in the house, and the weekends I spent alone when he had his two daughters staying with him.
MEETING THE CHILDREN
DATIng a man or woman with children means you have an instant measure for the value of your relationship, whether you want it or not. When, and indeed if, they decide to introduce you to the children becomes the barometer of what you mean to each other, how the relationship is progressing, how seriously involved you are and are likely to become.
The depth of my involvement with Bernardo was marked by meetings with his kids. After a few weeks of dating I met his son, and I saw more of him as I spent more time with his father. When, after a year together, Bernardo wanted me to move in, he asked his son before me.
However, while his son was very much present in our nascent relationship, Bernardo’s daughters were young and he didn’t want to confuse them further by introducing someone into their lives who might not be around for long.
He had left their mother three years earlier and I felt that breaking up his family was still a deep and private pain, so I respected this.
When he finally asked me to meet them, nearly a year into our relationship, I knew that it was a seminal moment.
I was coming back from a press trip to sardinia, the PR was on the plane with me. Bernardo was coming to the airport to pick me up with his daughters. I was fidgeting.
It was to be my first meeting with the girls, six and seven years old. The PR laughed: ‘You’ve been meeting millionaires and celebrities all weekend,’ she said, ‘and you haven’t been fazed. now you’re terrified of meeting two little girls!’
she was right, I was scared. What would I say to them? What if they hated me?
I needn’t have worried. When I stepped out of the airport, I spotted Bernardo standing with the two sweetest girls on either side of him. His face was a picture of pride.
As I stepped up to them, the girls raised round open faces to me, their smiles wide, and I fell head-overheels in love. Instinctively, I opened my arms and they stepped in and we hugged, a spontaneous gesture typical of the warmth of our relationship since.
SHADOW CAST BY THE EXES
In THe ten years since I became an ‘acquired’ mother (what one friend called me when I was not yet an official stepmother), I’ve been on a rollercoaster ride of adult emotion, with sharp lessons in grace and dignity. I’ve learnt that whatever the complexities of forming a bond with the stepchildren, it is always trickier navigating the shadow that falls behind them — the mother.
The source of so much influence over her children, the mother controls their relationship with the stepmother whether by her benign acceptance, or naked opposition, or the more common mix of hues in between. even if you never meet, you can tell from the behaviour and moods of the children what she is going through.
Often the children open their mouths and her words come out — this used to happen all the time with my stepdaughters when they were young sponges soaking up everything around them.
It can be disconcerting having someone you don’t really know and didn’t choose to have in your life be such a strong — if shadowy — presence and to know that your words and actions are being similarly transmitted to
her. It’s an uncomfortable relationship, distant yet intimate. And whether the mother is absent (as my stepson’s mother soon became) or much-too present (as my stepdaughters’ mother was), you, the stepmother, are always somehow paying the price for this woman’s behaviour.
With the kids, I made up my role as I went along — something between a fun aunt and scary matron. I didn’t become the official stepmother until last year and the years of ‘acquired’ motherhood were the most challenging.
What, actually, is your role? I have spoken to women who, having lived for a decade with a man, split up and never saw his children again. They went back to their lives as single women as if they hadn’t spent years mopping brows, cooking meals, changing nappies and helping their partner parent his children. The thought horrified me — all this unacknowledged love, all the care and nurturing disappearing.
The fear was not helped by the passiveaggressive actions of the mums — women who I know didn’t want to be mean to me but who, like me, were just having a hard time riding the emotional rollercoaster of the situation: one which demanded that they be happy their children loved me while they just felt so jealous that their children loved me. I did understand their dilemma but still it hurt. The first ex once reassured me that she would have her son to stay on the date of my first book launch in London, then promptly made other commitments, which meant we had to take him to London with us after all. The second ex once decided to take the girls away for three months and, at the last minute, changed the date of our goodbye dinner with them for a date when I was in London working. At every turn, in subtle ways, I was left out of the family by them, my love and care for their children discounted.
I know I am not alone. A study carried out by Dr Lisa Doodson, a psychology lecturer at Thames Valley University, showed that stepmothers in general have ‘significantly greater anxiety and depression than biological mothers’. Most stepfamilies face difficulties defining their individual roles and, says Dr Doodson, the ongoing influence of the biological mother, via endless phone calls or rules, is another source of anxiety.
LOVE THEM BUT DON’T CARE
BeIng a stepmother requires special courage — the willingness to love fiercely people who can never really belong to you. As the years have passed, I have learnt to love my stepchildren madly but not care; to be involved yet detached. It has been my survival strategy, and the quality of the relationship with my stepkids is testament to its efficacy.
Once, when I was despairing of it all and rueing the day I didn’t listen to my friend Carlo’s advice, a wise woman said to me ‘stepmothering is a long game’. Ten years down the line, I understand that.
My stepdaughters are now teenage glamazons, towering over me, catching men’s eyes with that late-teen mixture of nubile adult and child. I shepherd them through London, through the turning heads and wolf-whistles, with the pride and protectiveness of a lioness.
My stepson, now 25 and a chef in London, grows broader and more like his father every day. He rings me several times a week when I am in town, to share his triumphs and his heartbreaks — and, like a dutiful parent, I take him out for dinner, lend him £50 and find him bedsheets when he moves house.
In those years of tricky adolescence when his mother’s weekly visits had stopped, she was nowhere to be seen and his anger was directed at me, I never imagined that one day I would be signing off my texts to him ‘love you’ and getting a heart emoji back. every time it happens, it makes my heart sing.