When parental love is blind, stepparents see the way
Stepparents just can’t get it right. Or so I thought. Now I see that stepparents’ greatest weakness is their greatest strength: we just don’t care that much.
Of course, I do care about my stepdaughter, Cassie. I love her. My second husband cares about my son, Brendan. He loves him. But we don’t love each other’s children with the same I’d-die-to-save-you intensity that we have for our own. Love is blind — especially parental love.
What this means, in my experience, is that the small, day-to-day annoyances of child behavior irritate the stepparent more than the “real” parent. A crack opens up in the smooth façade of the blended family, as the parent leaps to his or her child’s defense, feeling compelled to justify the dishes left on the counter, the snide comment, the casual damage.
“She was in a hurry to get to school! She didn’t have time to put everything away.”
“Don’t blame him, he’s not good at handling delicate things like that. His motor skills just aren’t there yet!”
But though I could work up an outsized huff about Cassie leaving dishes on the counter, I didn’t stay up worrying whether her carelessness foreshadowed a lifetime of failure and lethargy. Frankly, my dear, I just didn’t care that much.
This was a good thing, sometimes. Like once, when Dan was in a heated argument with Cassie, forbidding her to wear fishnet stockings to a seventh-grade all-girl Hallowe’en party, I said to him, “Can I talk to you for a moment?” And then when we were in our room, speaking in whispers, I said, “I know you see this as protecting her, but it’s not going to hurt her to wear fishnets to a Hallowe’en party. What, do you think it’s going to turn her into a streetwalker? C’mon.”
We had dozens of whispered conferences like this, and for almost all of them, we were able to listen to each other, regroup, and then go back out to declare a compromise.
Dan helped me in the same way with my son. I remember once finding that Brendan had slashed deep gouges in his bureau, seemingly just to see he could damage it. I felt angry at first and then heavy, dragged down by the conviction that he must have serious problems to act like that. Dan was angry at first, too, but within minutes a thoughtful look crossed his face and he pulled me back up from the sucking swamp of despair.
“I wasn’t exactly like him,” he said. “But I did stuff like that. You know, compared to what I used to do, we’re getting off lightly with Brendan. I still remember the time I cut up my mother’s sofas. They were fake leather and I wanted to see what was underneath, like skinning an animal. So I skinned one sofa and left the naugahyde on the floor. And then I skinned the other.”
“Budding scientist decides experiments must be duplicated?” I said, trying to smile even though I still felt shaken inside. Some 40 years after the Naugahyde incident Dan was a successful scientist, helping to develop treatments for cancer.
He grinned. “That, and something about the destruction felt good. I think it’s a boy thing.”
Caring less proved even more important when the stakes were higher. I’ll always remember the night Dan returned from a visit with Cassie when she was 13. He and her mom had laid down a strong parental line about computer use and they had held firm. Any parent of a teenager can imagine the ugliness of the scene that followed.
He slumped down on the bench at the foot of our bed. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything more about it. I could only imagine what he felt. The moments when we don’t like our children are a parent’s private agony.
Though I could imagine it, I wasn’t feeling it. Cassie wasn’t my daughter, my reflected self, my little cargo of dreams for the future, my thousands of memories and hundreds of sacrifices large and small. Without the fear, the disappointment, and the pain, I was free to see her as just a kid. Cassie could be as moody and self-centered as any other adolescent, but she was also a thoughtful girl who consistently tried to do the right thing and went into a tailspin of doubt and self-criticism if anyone accused her of being unkind or unfair. I sat down next to Dan and put my arm around his shoulders.
“You two have been so close her whole life,” I said. “Believe me, this is a blip, a hormone-fueled developmentally appropriate storm. I shudder when I think back on some of the things I said to my mom. It’s not who Cassie really is or who she’s going to be — not when she’s grown up, and not even next week. Let it go.”
Sure enough, within two days Cassie was sobbing on the phone to him, choking out the words of a heartfelt apology.
If Cassie had been my daughter I couldn’t have said that. I’d have been hurt, angry, and despairing. I know, because when my son Brendan raged at me I would stand strong in his presence and then when I shut the door to my bedroom I slumped against the wall, my forehead in my hands. Was this remotely normal, or was it the beginning of an awful darkness? I pictured mumbling psychotics in the streets, set all-too-poignantly against memories of a giggling little boy on a swing set. My parental vigilance sounded internal sirens and flashed emergency lights, and I couldn’t see, think, or listen well.
There’s nothing like the awful fear that our child is desperate, dangerous, or deeply unlikeable. We lose sight of the child before us right now. Our vision fills with dark glimpses of our children’s dystopian future and we’re falling, falling, to hit bottom on the conviction that we’ve spent more than a decade of love and energy only to create a person that the world would be better off without.
Dan held me. “He’s so much better than when I first met him,” he said. “I know it seems like a long road, but at least he’s moving the right way. Time, babe. Time is working in your favor. He’s going to be just fine.”
Dan was right: all Brendan needed was time. And in that dark moment I could just about hear Dan over the roar of my internal panic because as a stepparent he had credibility that nobody else did. He’d spent so much time with my son and complained so often about the things Brendan did that I could trust him not to whitewash Brendan’s behavior.
I’ve always suspected that “intact” families had it easier, but after ten years of living the blended family life, I came to see that stepparents can offer something wonderful that “real” parents usually can’t. When parental love blinds us — either with an overly dark or excessively adoring perspective — stepparents can guide us back to seeing our children as the complex young people that they truly are. And that’s a great gift for parents and children alike.