Banishing the wicked stepmother image
Those who won over the offspring
Martin Amis is known for his acid pen and sarcastic tone, but recently I found myself in tears at something he’d written. The author was paying tribute to Elizabeth Jane Howard, his stepmother. With tireless dedication, he wrote, his father’s wife had tutored him for more than a year, transforming him from a “semiliterate truant and wastrel” into an Oxford scholar.
Howard, herself a prolific novelist, died aged 90 on Jan. 2. I hope that she knew of her stepson’s devotion — and I’m sure she took an artist’s pleasure in debunking the stereotype of the “wicked” stepmother.
Another writer and stepmother, Joanna Trollope, has explored the effects that second marriages have on offspring of all ages in Other People’s Children. Long fascinated by the stepmother myth, she has said: “The perception of stepmothers as wicked, dangerous, inimical to children, is perhaps more to do with our feelings about true motherhood than bad stepmotherhood, namely that the desire to see our true mothers as good is so strong that we cannot face the possibility that they might fail us.”
As a stepmother myself, I can only say it’s time to reclaim the term. Her sinister reputation has deep roots in popular culture — everyone from the brothers Grimm to Walt Disney has lampooned her. But in a country where one in three people is a “step” (parent, child or sibling) and more women than ever are childless, stepmothers may soon outnumber “natural” mothers. To cling to the step-monster cliché will prove tricky when she is everywhere you turn.
Already, a new crop of stepmothers has rewritten the fairy tale about the cruel interloper who seduces Daddy and tortures his offspring. And no one has done this better than Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
The former Mrs. Parker Bowles faced the step-challenge from hell: the public and the media blamed her for breaking up Prince Charles’s marriage to the People’s Princess. Diana had spoken publicly about Camilla being the third person in her marriage to the Prince of Wales. And the couple’s young sons, William and Harry, were always pictured at their mummy’s side, looking both adoring and protective. The Princess’s fatal car crash seemed to cement the image of her as a martyr and of Camilla as the “Rottweiler” (Diana’s term for her) who’d gnawed at the royal marriage for years.
Fast forward to 2011. At the smart Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, two ladies sit lunching, engrossed in an earnest conversation. The younger, according to diners nearby, apparently asking for “advice.” The identity of the two women? Kate Middleton and Camilla Parker Bowles. The incident nailed, once and for all, the myth of Camilla as the wicked stepmother.
The Duchess of Cornwall could have received no clearer sign of her stepson’s approval than for his intended to seek her counsel before the young couple’s wedding. Camilla had obviously succeeded in what had once seemed impossible: Melting the resentment that Diana’s sons had felt toward their father’s true love.
How did Camilla do it? Very slowly, I suspect. A good stepmother knows that she must not rush her new charges into acceptance, let alone affection. She must not love-bomb them at the outset, lest they suspect her of trying to oust their mother from their heart as well as their father’s.
“She needs to allow time for the children to be sure that she does not threaten their relationship with their father,” said Fergus Greer, a family psychoanalyst. “If she expects an instant welcome, she’ll be disappointed. Even in a civilized divorce, children will be hostile to the stranger in Daddy’s life. In those cases where the divorce is acrimonious, the exwife may be programming her children to give the new woman a very hard time.”
I wonder if that’s what Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother, did with her children when her ex-husband married Raine, then Lady Dartmouth? Certainly the Princess of Wales seemed hostile from the outset, dubbing her father’s new wife “acid Raine.” But in the months before her death, whom did Diana confide in? None other than her wise and worldly stepmother.
Tom Cruise’s children are said to still talk regularly with his ex-wife, Katie Holmes, even though she and their adoptive father had a high-profile divorce.
I hope I’ll never need to test whether my relationship with my stepsons can survive my divorcing their father. Johnny and Hugo (respectively 10 and eight when I met them) transformed my life even more than their father did when I met him at the age of 42. Having left childbirth so late, I never dared hope I’d have a child — let alone three. Yet I went from singleton to matriarch in a year, and have never looked back.
If ours was a whirlwind romance, my courtship of Edward’s children took time. Experience as well as instinct guided me: I had had a difficult relationship with my stepmother, Michaela, and pledged to learn from our mistakes.
I therefore took pains to allow the boys to dictate our relationship. They had little choice in everything else that had happened. I reassured them by instituting a day with Daddy — when neither I nor their baby half-sister loomed. I cooked and cleaned for them, but refrained from cooing (at least, not too much) and questioning.
Johnny, the elder, was more receptive sooner. I still remember bursting with happiness when he slipped his hand in mine during a walk through the fields near his grandparents’ home. Hugo, instead, took time to mull things over. About a year after we met, I was cooking in the kitchen when he stole up behind me and whacked my bottom. When I wheeled around, furious, Hugo didn’t say anything, but his expression told me that this nineyear-old had just vented his frustration and confusion at being with a woman who was not Mummy but kept doing mummy-like things.
We have lived together for almost a decade. I haven’t had to tutor my stepsons like Elizabeth Jane Howard had to do with young Martin: they are neither illiterates nor wastrels — quite the contrary. But I would hope that, should they need a bit of coaching or advice, they’d turn to me, their wicked stepmother.