Unless your partner has spent their reproductive years firing blanks, over-using the rhythm method or assiduously guarding their sperm, chances are any new relationship post-divorce/40 is going to include children. Sometimes you’ll both have one, or two, or more than a few, like The Brady Bunch, and they seemed to make it work.
The younger man has a two-year-old. At the other end of the spectrum, my own daughter is 25 and pretends to be allergic to toddlers, in case she should accidentally want one.
“What does the Child eat?” she asked in frosty tones as we went out for dinner.
“Souls?”
“Pizza.”
“Oh, yay, I love pizza.”
Other people’s children are generally lovely, especially if they’re really wee: a baby is much less likely to declare, “Mummy says you’re a gold digger,” than a five-year-old. However, the whole stepmother thing can be a minefield.
I recently read a bizarre letter to a New Zealand agony aunt from a mother who seriously considered giving up her son because her new boyfriend demanded it. Mental.
A friend had two teenage stepkids, primed and ready to hate her guts, dropped off at her place for the school holidays where they made every day a living hell.
For my own part, I had an evil period where I sent Sophia off to her father’s with a different musical instrument every weekend: drums, a recorder, violin… If it was annoying and she couldn’t play it, you could bet I’d supply it. Unlike Abba, his new girlfriend never once thanked me for the music.
Sometimes this genetic hopscotch works out brilliantly. My stepfather Alan, or ‘Alan Key’ as he’s known among family members, has three daughters of his own, two step-daughters and one step-granddaughter.
In the absence of any other capable man, he travels between all our houses fixing whatever is broken and earning our eternal devotion.
The look on his face when he met the younger man (who grew up on a farm, where a child abuse level of competence is expected from an early age) was one of untrammelled relief. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘It’s your turn now buddy, I’m off to golf.’
Would I make a good step-parent, I wonder? I’d certainly love to be described as ‘wicked,’ but let’s face it, a stepmother is basically an unpaid au pair.
The Uber driver every member of the family loves to hate, even if the breakup was mutual, stepmothers experience higher levels of depression than mothers.
Perhaps it’s because they try so hard to please, knock themselves out spending time, energy and money on someone else’s offspring with nothing but Playdoh hair and a wall doodled in Revlon Colorstay to show for it.
While I’m not going to go as far as my gran, who said ‘The only thing that should be blended is foundation at the chin line’, maybe it’s time to give the myth of the blended family the boot, and simply be just another grown up on the small person’s team. A cheerleader, a cart-wheeler, there to provide a hug if they fall over.
Because an extended network of open arms is a wonderful thing for a child to have. I’ll gladly be a smiling face, and if it means I get a little hand in mine from time to time, a sticky kiss, a ‘Leesa come too?’, then that’s an absolute gift.
I’m not talking ‘failure to provide the necessities of life’ level ambivalence, but the only in loco parentis I plan to do is if the ‘loco’ is a train and the child is standing on the railway tracks.
Also, just quietly, I’ve got off to a bad start already. I should have resisted – even though the fruit of my loins has made it to adulthood avoiding being knocked-up or jailed – the urge to impart wisdom.
Like kicking a bear in the nuts and waiting to see what happens, this goes down very badly. Nothing says ‘maternal resentment’ like being taught to suck eggs by the ex’s new girlfriend.
Studies show women tend to nurture feelings of hostility and anger post-divorce longer than men (and how!) so I’ll just sit over here ‘no commenting’ for the foreseeable. Oh, and both Brady Bunch parents were widowed, it turns out.
