Real Life of a Stepmom

Extended Family Dynamics Part II

Before I launch into this posting, I would like to make a comment regarding Part I of this subject.  Thanks to feedback from my husband and friends, it has come to my attention that I need to provide some clarification.  First of all, my husband made a very valid point that the dysfunction of his family interaction (or lack thereof) existed before I came into the picture.  With that said, I would have to surmise that my situation is probably on the extreme end of things when it comes to relationships with in-laws.  Secondly, in speaking with other women who are not stepmoms, I realize that there are very few who have good relationships with their mothers-in-law or other in-laws for that matter.

 

Part II of Extended Family Dynamics is regarding my family and how they embraced their relationships with my stepsons and their experiences.  Again, please be reminded that this is my personal experience and yours may be the polar opposite.  I am just putting this out there to prepare a potential stepparent for something like this.

 

From Day One, my parents, relished in their roles as grandparents to my stepsons.  From their first meeting – long before my husband and I married – my stepsons called them Grandma and Pap-Pap.  My parents loved and treated them the same way they did their only other grandchild at the time.  Perhaps because my parents reside across the country and their visits were infrequent, there was no perceived “threat” to the boys’ mom about them having these additional grandparents and calling them as such.  The same held true for my brother and his family.  Again, from a geographic standpoint, they are 3,000 miles away.  From the viewpoint of my family, the treatment of my stepsons was transparent to the way other grandchildren and nieces and nephews were treated.  Holidays, birthdays, special occasions were all recognized by my family with cards, gifts, phone calls just like every other family member.  My father enjoyed getting them involved in his hobby of coin collecting and teaching them math.  When my father passed away last year, his obituary listed his survivors and referenced his five grandchildren specifically by name which included my stepsons.  That is just the way it is for my family.  They are “all in”.

 

From my standpoint, I enjoyed the “normalcy” this brought to my family life when we were all together.  We got to function together as an extended family unit even for just a few days.  However, underneath the happy time a sadness existed especially from my parents’ view.  While they were receiving all of the joys of being grand-parents, it gnawed at them that I wasn’t called “Mom” by my stepsons.  Every time the boys would address their “Grandma” or Uncle” as any other family member would to each other, when it came to me, they called me by my first name and for my parents their utopia ceased to exist.  I explained to them the reasons why it was that way, but they saw their daughter being a mother and not being recognized as such by name and it bothered them.  Let’s face it, it bothered me too, but I made up my mind early on that I would never force my stepsons to call me mom if they didn’t want to.

 

For 11 years my family enjoyed their relationships with my stepsons and then it all came to a screeching halt. (For me as well, but that is a separate posting).  Thanks to a lawsuit by their mother and the subsequent ruling, it was as if these relationships never existed.  Basically, with the result of the court ruling and the fact that stepparents have no legal rights, there is nothing a step-anybody can do of their own accord to continue the relationship if the other party is not – or cannot be – receptive to it.  So, that is the simplified version of what happened.  My family dealt with the loss of my stepsons on a Monday and the death of my father on the Friday of the same week.  The sense of loss for all three was overwhelming.  However, with my father, you understood and eventually accepted his death.  But with the boys, there is no closure.  There is a huge void in the hearts of my family and they miss the boys terribly and are frustrated and angry over the situation.  After more than a year, there is some form of acceptance of the way the situation is yet hope that it will change at some point in the future.  With the type of person that I am, I can accept the pain in my heart because I made the choice to enter this relationship.  However, I have to admit that I shoulder a large part of the responsibility of their pain because I brought this upon them and I can’t fix it by myself.

Extended Family Dynamics Part I

You logically understand when you get serious with a man who was previously married that his family had a relationship with his ex-wife.  However, when you first meet his family, they are so happy that he is out of the “old” relationship that they seemingly welcome you with open arms.  You may even hear things like, “where have you been all his life” as well as a lot of dirty laundry as to why they couldn’t stand his ex.  The operative word in what I just wrote is seemingly.  In my case I was completely duped by my husband’s mother, brothers, and sisters.  I can honestly say that because my father-in-law is more removed from the family geographically, he can be more objective.  He is the only in-law that has been consistently nice to me and stayed in touch albeit infrequently. 

  

  

 

 

The point I am trying to make here is your in-laws were her in laws. What happened in my case was they were happy with me initially because my husband was happy, but they never genuinely accepted me.  I am not blaming them actually.  You need to be realistic when you marry someone who has children and nieces and nephews close to their children’s ages.  In my husband’s situation, the cousins all spent a lot of time together.  They all spent a lot of time at their grandmother’s.  On top of that, my husband’s ex lived close to my mother-in-law and despite the fact my husband told his mother that she needed to respect his current wife, it was easier for her to choose his ex.  Why?  Well, in my case the ex is the type who will not take no for an answer and knows how to manipulate situations to get her way.  So, she would use the boys as her excuse to stay connected.  She would take the kids over to my mother-in-law’s house on the weekends she had the boys and let them stay over (so she could carry on her social life).  When my husband objected to the relationship with his ex to his mother, she tried to insinuate that she never saw the boys unless their mother brought them to her house.  And, the tangled web began….

  

  

 

So, you can only imagine as the years went by my intermittent relationship with my in-laws became virtually non-existent.  I realize that my husband’s ex filled them with numerous fictitious horrible stories about me to support her cause and they bought it.  I also realize that it had nothing to do with me personally – I could be any Jane Doe out there.  I just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.  Again, you can make sense of these things logically, but it doesn’t take away the hurt.  My husband made attempts with his mother to get her to respect his current situation (i.e., me as well as our child together) but things have not changed.  I don’t deserve it, but what’s worse is I had no idea to expect it.  If I knew to expect the estranged in-law situation up-front, I wouldn’t have invested myself into it so much emotionally, thus making it so hard to recover.  What’s worse is just when I feel like I can deal with it, I experience terrible disappointment and anger at the treatment my in-laws give our biological son.  My mother-in-law has not seen him since he was 9 months old (he is almost 6 ½).  My brothers and sisters-in-law (there are 5 of them) have probably seen him all tolled a dozen times since he was born. The disrespect and disregard they show to their own flesh-and-blood nephew is very hard for a mother to take.  I don’t have an answer for it, but this is the reality of my situation and hopefully yours will not be the same.

Pussification

Huh?!  Did you read that right?  Yes, it says pussification.  It’s a word I made up.  Think of the word “multiplication”.  One of its definitions is “the result of multiplying”.  Well, my definition of pussification is the result of being a pussy.

 

What does this have to do with anything?  Well, I guarantee you that not too long into your role as a stepmom, you will witness your partner becoming a pussy.  Get this clear though, he will be the “manly man” with you, but he will become pussified with his ex-wife.  The first couple of times it happens, you aren’t really even aware of it.  But,as time goes on, you will see this out of character development and be stunned and eventually very angry. 

 

Let me give you an example…you know how you might be “corrected” by your husband for not acting the way he wanted you to or be told you that you were being unreasonable when you stood your ground?  Well, it is the exact opposite with his ex-wife.  You will be riding in the car and his cell phone rings. You notice that his voice has adopted an air of overt niceness to it.  Not really paying attention, you ignore it figuring it’s a customer of his.  But, the phone call continues on a little longer than it should and you realize you hear yelling coming from the other side and – let me make this abundantly clear – 99% of the time he maintains the sweet tone of voice.  No matter how intense the issue may be, he will listen patiently, eventually have some casual banter and end the call cordially with her.  It is astounding.  When you are held hostage in the car and this happens, you just want to scream.  Invariably, when he hangs up you are steaming and if you say a word you will regret it because he will vent on you immediately.

 

Another example is when he talks to his ex, it’s always in the first person.  To be fair, this may not be how he handles it initially, but in my case, it quickly evolved to this.  When referring to anything related to the kids it became, “I’ll pick them up at 3:00”, “I’ll take them to the doctor”, “I’ll make sure they get that project done”, etc.  What then happens is the triangular relationship I wrote about a few postings ago boomerangs back even stronger.  Even when all the parties involved knew that I was the one commuting the boys, my husband would get the call about a change in pick-up time or something else and then he would have to call me to convey the message.  There was no direct communication with me whatsoever.

 

On all fronts from a stepmom standpoint this behavior is just flat-out wrong.  Believe me, I can understand being a pussy out of fear that your ex-wife can take you back to Court and make your life even more miserable. But - and read this closely - it doesn’t guarantee that it will prevent it from happening.  How do I know?  That is what happened to us.  I can see my husband’s rationale that he didn’t want to set her off when she would call and be a raging maniac.  I can also see how he thought it was the right thing to exclude me from the picture by not saying “we” or not insisting that she call me directly instead of reinforcing the view that I am an “outsider”.  But this approach is fundamentally wrong.  He didn’t want to bring my name up with her to avoid upsetting her and having her go off on a tangent of how she hates me.  Unfortunately, all it did was allow her to wield the power over the situation.

 

The accumulation of power begins slowly but grows exponentially.  Suddenly, this petite, helpless “victim” is the 10,000 lb gorilla.  When it grows so out of control I really don’t know how you can reclaim a balance of power after it has gotten so incongruous.  As I alluded to above, our situation basically imploded on us and she raked us over the coals.  While the ashes are still smoldering for us, I can’t say that we now have the power scale balanced because that can never happen with the current Family Law system as long as you have minor children and are not the custodial parent.  But what can happen is what should have happened at the beginning.  He will need to speak in terms of “we” and make sure my role is acknowledged with both her and the boys.  He cannot perpetuate the triangularity in communication where I am involved.  Whether it will be with her, or one of the boys, he will need to insist they communicate with me directly.  And, when resistance is met, it is imperative that all potential pussification is avoided by him saying to her, “She has been a part of my life for 12 years and will continue to be so get over it.”