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I Am Not an Evil Stepmother


At least, I don’t think I am evil. Or all that bad as a step-mother. And as a result, I take offense when I read stories where step-mothers are villanized or watch movies in which they are reduced to fairy tale stereo-types.

Being a step-parent is not something I ever considered. When I was single, I refused to date men with children from previous relationships because as a teacher I’d never encountered a blended family where the adults made even the slightest effort to be adults and parent cooperatively and it was the horror of that which compelled me to nix daddies as date material.*

Even as a widow, when I had almost nothing but men with children from whom to pick, I still didn’t give much thought to step-motherhood. Or step-fatherhood even. I was determined that Dee have a father who would love her like his own. There would be no “step” because I don’t buy into the notion that love can only blossom biologically where offspring are concerned.**

I don’t claim to have some magically family blending powers or secret recipe. Rob and I have always approached it as a united front and with the attitude that everyone around us will adjust if given time, love and attention, and things go well for us on this front.

Last night Dee and I watched the horrid A Cinderella Story with Hillary Duff and some boy-toy flavor of that particular moment. The story began with a little girl and her widowed father, who was just shy of utter perfection and loved by all. He marries, inexplicably and without much warning, a  woman who made me shudder before she said a single word. Name the stereo-typical affliction and she had it. Plain to homely face. Overweight. Shallow. Materialistic. The mothering skill set of a magpie*** And, of course, two mini-me’s.

Assuming that one can put set aside their disbelief at this point, or swallow the idea that remarriage – for a man anyway – spells certain doom by way of untimely death, then the rest of the movie makes sense.

But I kept coming back to the evil step-mother thing because I am not evil nor do I know any woman who is a real life step-mother who is.

The first blended family I encountered belonged to elementary school friends, Karla and Patty. They’d lost their mother and father respectively and their parents found each other and remarried when they were in the second grade. They were the second youngest with several much older siblings and a younger brother apiece. In all, there were about 10 or 11 children ranging from 6 to late teens. There were ups and downs, but they considered themselves a real family and their step-parents “real” parents.

Sam Baker wrote a post for The Guardian this last week about literary step-mothers which provoked an interesting give/take on DoubleX.

Since I am tired of the only comments I receive being spam, I would like to hear your opinions. I yield the floor.

* I knew many children who regarded their step-parents well and had warm relationships. It was the “grown-ups” and their issue that was my issue.

** People who do think this should be avoided as romantic prospects. jmo, but idiot thinking like that is simply the tip of an iceberg best left to some other intrepid soul.

*** Edie’s downstairs neighbors rescued a baby magpie last fall and are keeping it as a pet. (They are from B.C. – seriously people without sense where animals are concerned). They feed it raw hamburger.  Magpies have been known to carry off small kittens to feast on.

God’s Mid-term Election Herald


Is a demon sheep apparently. Carly Fiorina fired the first teabagger shot in the California Republican primary with this rather wordy, but totally hilarious negative television ad.

Went all James Cameron on the special effects, didn’t they?

I don’t know what was more amateurish. The fact that it segued from one word sound-bites to an Exorcist inspired narrator who addresses someone named Tom instead brainwashing the masses (who probably headed to the kitchen for snacks after the Sesame Street Christian Lady stopped talking), or that the ad seems to imply that Republicans are sheep* and that “Tom” has some sort of fetish for dressing up and stalking them.

The “wolf” in sheep’s clothing, who looks suspiciously like a staffer wearing a rug from Wal-Mart, must really need that job to ruin his khakis like that.

Mid-term election hell has begun. It’s going to be a long 2010 for you folks down under (and by “down under” I mean under Canada, where our Prime Minister suspends Parliament on a whim every 9 or 10 months – bet you wish Obama could do that, eh?)

*Which is an apt a symbol as you will find.

My Life as a Knight


You Are a Knight
You are very unusual and even a bit eccentric. No one can really figure you out easily.
Because you’re not predictable, people behave irrationally around you. They may feel threatened by your presence, or they may underestimate you completely.

You do best when you’re close to the action. You don’t move quickly, so you need to be near the center of things if you want to make a difference.
You tend to act quickly, and decisively. In fact, you are often the first person to make a move.

Actually, this makes total sense. One of the things that made me an effective teacher was the fact that children had a hard time reading me. This tended to make them docile in the long run because they only thing they knew for sure was that doing what I wanted ensured a peaceful co-existence  and that going against me would result in something unpleasant.

I found this game via my husband. It proclaimed him “king” which should surprise no one who knows even the tiniest thing about him. One thing it mentioned was that many people depend on him and would be doomed should he “go down”. There are several people I can think of for whom this would be true but ultimately, they would simply become my responsibility, so it would be okay. Not as okay as they would be with him. I have a shorter fuse and am less willing/able in some cases to fix things. I am not one of the doomed and I find that sad on one hand and reassuring on the other.