I've Been Both a Stepmother and Stepdaughter: Personal Takes from Two Sides

More than 40 years ago, when my twin stepdaughters were 10, I described them in one of my weekly columns, imagining the three of us in years to come, going out for a glass of wine, laughing and talking. 

I met the girls when they were only 3½, but grew close to them when I married their dad a few years later. When they visited, Barry and I shared our love of the outdoors with them — hiking, bicycling, swimming, stargazing and camping. At home, we played card games, made candles and Christmas ornaments, and danced to ABBA. Occasionally, on weekends when Barry was out of town, the girls visited just me.

Although their mother, who had sole custody, was never an easy personality, we were always polite, if constrained, with her. But she was so openly mocking and contemptuous of Barry that I believe some of that rubbed off on the girls. 

At 15, after months of tension with her mom, one daughter ran away from home and announced she wanted to live with us. Within 24 hours, we became custodial parents. There was no time to adjust to the new reality. I never asked myself, "Am I willing to do this? Am I up for this?" 

Of course, a child's needs come first, and I didn't think twice about it. Still, I sometimes wonder if I had gone away by myself for a day or two to reflect on the situation and try to prepare myself for the sea change ahead, if anything would have turned out differently.

Foolishly, Barry and I thought we could parent a troubled teenager while still maintaining the freewheeling lifestyle we'd always enjoyed. We gave our daughter way too much freedom, simply because we didn't want to do the hard work of being responsible parents. Eventually we figured it out, but not without a lot of pain.

Although Barry and I have always been in touch with our families, his ex barely communicated with hers, and as they grew up, both daughters adopted that pattern. One daughter had no contact with her mom for a period in her 20s, and each of them cut off from us in their 40s, one permanently. Neither was open to family therapy or mediation.

Our daughter who lived with us, who is now 55, wants a relationship with her dad but not with me. "To be blunt, I just don't like you," she said in an email. Her rejection feels deeply personal, because I devoted so much emotional energy to her, even a period when I parented her by myself for several months while Barry worked in another state. 

I have acknowledged and apologized to her for the harmful things I've done, but she's pretty clear. My task now is to give myself grace for what I did right, try not to blame myself for forces bigger than myself, and accept the decision she has made. No small order.

The one redeeming part is that she doesn't discourage our delightful, funny grandsons from seeing us.

When I was 25, eight months after my mother died, my father married a British woman who, with her widowed husband, had been friends of my parents 30 years earlier. His marriage to Dulcie was way too soon for me. I was still reeling from the loss of my mother, but because I wanted my father to be happy, I minimized the challenges of adapting to a stepmother as an adult. 

I did like her, though. Dulcie was an outlier who planted vegetables, eschewed dryers and hung the wash on the line — rare in 1970s suburbia. For her birthday, I wrote her a poem:

All of sixty
Quite a pixie
Plenty of pulse—
That's our Dulc.

Fond of dogs
(but not of jogs)
She's grown a garden
Helped hearts unharden.

Had she lived longer, I'm sure I would have had some challenges with her, but I suspect our shared sense of humor would have carried us a long way. My next stepmother wasn't as easy. It didn't help that Eunice moved into a house fraught with history, filled with the furniture, antiques, dishware and knickknacks of my father's earlier wives. Throughout their marriage, she felt guilty that by moving in with my dad, she deprived her sons of their family home. 

At the time of their marriage, my stepbrothers were in college, whereas my sisters and I were in our 20s, independent and living farther away. Like most men of his generation, my dad left the domestic affairs to his wife, which meant that my stepbrothers visited them much more than my sisters and I did. There wasn't room for all of us at the same time, and if anyone had priority, it was the boys. The fact that my dad didn't appear to lobby on our behalf was a huge source of resentment, especially to my two sisters who had kids. My stepmother wasn't very comfortable with children, especially those who weren't her biological grandkids, and my sisters often didn't feel welcome.

My older sister in particular had a lifelong resentment of her. I felt she unfairly blamed Eunice for the frustrations she had with my father, reflecting the cultural bias against stepmothers, something I also wonder if my stepdaughter does with me. 

When visiting, I always made an effort to create one-on-one time with my father, and we'd go out for breakfast together. Such a joy to have him all to myself!

Though I wasn't close to Eunice, I did feel compassion for her. She had breast cancer two years in a row, and later became ill with back issues and other cancers that lasted much of her life. She died at 72.

Five years later my older sister also died. With both of them gone, tensions finally relaxed. We started a tradition of extended family reunions at campgrounds on the East Coast, with all the stepsiblings — Dulcie's daughters, Eunice's sons, my sisters, spouses, kids, Barry and me. We came from all over — various parts of the United States, London, Jamaica, Paris, Scotland, and Mexico —and we hiked, swam and camped together. But it took my stepmother's and sister's deaths before that could happen.

As a stepmother, I've seen, tragically, that hostility between exes can damage the children's relationship with one or both parents, and that patterns of conflict repeat themselves in a generational cycle.

As a stepdaughter, my bond with my dad was a lifeline to me, and I appreciate that my stepmother didn't interfere. Because of this, I have a core belief that the parent-child bond can restore and heal, which is why I'm encouraging Barry to nurture his connection with our daughter, regardless of how she feels about me.

Among my peers, I'm familiar with a number of stepfamilies, and not all are as messy and convoluted as mine have been. Some smooth out over time. But wherever I look, it's never simple. The roles of stepmother and stepdaughter seem to be intrinsically complex and rarely easy.