One of the ugliest truths of stepfamily reality, I learned as I researched my book Stepmonster, is competition. Namely, competition between the woman with stepkids and her husband's kids for the husband/father's time, attention, and assets.
In spite of our culture's insistence that divorced and remarried men with kids can jerry rig a life where "both his kids and his wife come first," and regardless of our notion that women should just "put his kids first because it's right," we live in the real world. And in that real world, the longitudinal studies by Bray, Ahrons, and Hetherington tell us, kids of all ages often find themselves in loyalty binds, leading them to treat their stepmothers in unkind ways. Other kids who have been parented permissively post- divorce (a common phenomenon) may act out well into adulthood, blaming their stepmothers for their parent's divorce even when it isn't the case, and failing to treat their father, his marriage and his wife with respect. Divorced fathers, for their part, too often refuse to require civil behavior from their kids toward stepmom, out of guilt that the kids went through a divorce, and fear that if they draw the line, the kids will walk away forever. And finally, more than a few stepmothers who want very badly to get stepmothering right will find themselves depleted from years of rebuffs; they may retreat in disappointment or frustration, in an effort to protect themselves and preserve their dignity. Steprelations, the experts cited above tell us, are virtually never effortless, and they are frequently difficult.
Put competition over His time, love, and assets into this tinderbox of a context, and you see why stepfamily life can feel so combustible.
And so a recent story about the New York City trial of the son of famed socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor caught my eye. "Astor Grandson says Stepmom's real villain" the headline blared (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/astor_grandson_stepmom_real...)
Phillip Marshall, multimillionaire Brooke's grandson, says it is a shame his father Anthony was convicted of grand larceny and conspiracy for allegedly diverting to himself more than $60 million of his mother's fortune intended for charity. Phillip says dad was merely acting at the behest of his wife, Phillip's stepmother Charlene Marshall.
"She should have gone to jail. The fact that my father is going to serve a year and Charlene is walking away free-it's just so unfair," Phillip has said.
Most of us won't find ourselves in a position where tens of millions are at stake, and I have no clue about what Charlene, Anthony, and Phillip Marshall are really like, or what went down in their particular stepsituation over the last decades.
But what is clear is that in some ways, they're just typical. First of all, they're fighting about money, a very real and very limited (in most cases) resource, and frequently a source of tension between adult stepchildren and their stepmothers. A number of people I interviewed for my book expressed anxiety that "My stepmom is going to inherit the family country house that I should get" or "His kids don't want me to get a dime. I'm an obstacle in their inheritance plans." Drs. Grace Gabe and Jean Lipman-Blumen, co-authors of a book about adult stepfamilies called Stepwars, have noted that, while adult stepchildren expect to provide for their own spouses in the event of their own death, they frequently don't expect dad to do the same for his spouse.
Charelene Marshall may be truly rapacious. But often, stepmothers are considered selfish and unseemly for even wanting to discuss their own financial futures. "You should leave all that up to your husband, his personal decision, and bow out," one stepmother I interviewed was stupefied to be told by her best friend, who happened to be a financial planner. You can't pay advice that bad. And you don't have to-you hear such judgments masquerading as insight with startling frequency once you become a stepmother.
Meanwhile, the excuses Phillip makes for his father-a man the jury found culpable of essentially stealing his own mother's millions-are a classic stepchild sleight-of-hand. It is easier to blame and resent stepmom, stepfamily experts Anne C. Bernstein and Linda Neilsen have noted, than to feel angry at dad. Stepmothers frequently find themselves functioning as the family lightning rod, Mavis Hetherington and James Bray have observed, absorbing the anger kids and adult kids feel about their parents breaking up even when the remarriage happened long after. "It's easier for me to be mad at my stepmom than to blame my dad," one insightful man I interviewed told me. "She's expendable. But he's my father."
The Astor mess may be mythical and larger than life. But in some sense, it is stepfamily life as usual.
