Here’s What I’ve Learned About Step Parenting (So Far)

this is a funny picture to use because I am the same age as the boys’ mom (sorry, Kasey!)

I’ve been waiting for the right time to write about the experience of becoming a stepmom (is it a coincidence that my phone automated that to “becoming a demon”?!) and my experience, thus far, of step parenting two gorgeous, challenging, adorable, frustrating children.

I had somehow thought I’d just wake up one day and feel as though I’d finally cracked it, like I’d figured it all out. I’d suddenly have completed the stepmom exam and be ready to share with the world.

But… surprise, surprise, as in life, so too in step parenting, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be “done” learning the lessons these children, and this life, have to teach me. So either there’ll never be a “right” time to write this piece, or (depending on your outlook), there’ll never be a “wrong” time.

Right now, I’m in glass-half-full mode (I don’t have a headache! And I passed my Indiana driving test!), so this feels like as right a time as any. (Lucky you.)

This week marked my three-year wedding anniversary, which is also the anniversary of my becoming a stepmom to two little (but getting bigger every day) boys. It’s not a long time, in the grand scheme of things – but in terms of their lives (they’re 9 and 11), it’s a pretty big chunk.

I first met Brandin in the summer of 2019, while I was in Indiana staying with my sister, and hunting for a husband looking to meet people on Tinder. I met Finn (9) and William (11) a few months later, when we went for burgers to Brava’s downtown.

I remember thinking they were very shy – entirely unlike their Dad, who would chat to anyone, with absolutely zero encouragement – and worrying that they didn’t like me. As we left the restaurant, one of them – I can’t remember which one – asked Brandin if I could come back to their house with them, like I was a new friend they’d just met at the playground. It was the first sign that maybe we were going to get on okay.

Less than a year later, in the summer of 2020 – and that was a really weird time, when all of my Irish friends and family were cocooned in their homes, while Brandin was still going into his office every day and not everyone was wearing a mask in the supermarket – I moved in with them.

Since then, I’ve made a lot of mistakes with these sweet, sensitive boys. I like to think I’ve done some things right, too – but you’d probably have to ask them. For now, here’s some wisdom I’ve distilled from my experience as the world’s most average stepmom.

Keep changes to a minimum

When I first moved in with them, it was to the house Brandin had bought shortly after his divorce, when it was just the three of them (and, at that, just half the time, as he and his ex have 50/50 custody). It’s a 1,300 sq ft ranch-style home, with a large family room and a small adjoining kitchen, three small bedrooms and one bathroom. You can check it out here if a visual aid would help, or if you just want to see my decor choices.

Within a few weeks, I had added about $1,000 worth of Ikea furniture – a coffee table in the living room, instead of the black pleather eyesore storage ottoman that had been there before; a beautiful sideboard in the living area – and repainted the kitchen cabinets. We got rid of their bunkbeds, and replaced them with “grown-up” twin beds, complete with matching spotty duvet sets. I bought a lovely vintage couch on Facebook Marketplace, and gave it pride and place in the living room, replacing a beaten-up greige number Brandin had got from a friend.

I should have known then – she says, now, with the benefit of much hindsight – that I was making a mistake, when the boys went on (and on and on) about how much they missed that ottoman, that all of these changes were coming at them too quickly, but I didn’t really stop to think about it at all. I just thought, honestly, that they were weirdly attached to that ottoman.

Which is why when, in the following year, about six months after I’d moved in, I found out I was pregnant, neither Brandin nor I thought twice about putting the house on the market and looking for a new place to live for the soon-to-be-five of us.

Looking back at it now, it was all way too much to drop on two already-quite-confused-and-disrupted little boys, who had gone through the unpheaval of divorce, their Dad moving out, their new 50/50 schedule and their Dad’s girlfriend coming to live with them, in a very short space of time.

I was just so excited to be living with Brandin and the boys, all of whom I love so much, and I was determined to be someone who brought with her good things: new furniture and colourful rugs and a bigger house with a bigger garden in an estate with loads of other kids, and a baby brother! I didn’t really stop to think that (a) little boys don’t really care about furniture and also, and more importantly (b) they needed time to adjust.

Sure, our family was getting bigger, but we could have done another year in that house – Atlas was in our bedroom for that long anyway – and they were happy as Larry in their bunkbeds and I suppose we didn’t need a different, admittedly less comfortable, couch.

They talk, sometimes, about the old house, and oh, the embellishments they add: they wax lyrical about the fun they had, playing in the back garden (it didn’t have a back garden); and how big their old room was (smaller than their new one); and how much more they loved the old house because they had friends, four doors up (friends who had moved across town several months before we sold up).

And while I’ll never know if this rose-tinted nostalgia would have been different, had they had more time to get used to each change as it came along, I can’t help but wonder if all of this revisionist history could have been avoided, had we been a little less trigger-happy when it came to all of the massive life changes we foisted on those two small boys in such a short period of time.

You and your partner need to be on the same page

…in decor choices, and in life.

This is why, really the “be their friend, not their parent” advice really doesn’t work. As a parental figure, if not an actual parent, I need to present a united front with their Dad, so that neither one of us gets pitted against the other.

If I say they can have ice-cream, Brandin can’t come in and tell them that they can’t, and vice versa. It holds true, too, when it comes to replacing furniture – it can’t be something Rosemary did – and setting bedtimes.

I know good cop, bad cop, can work for some people, especially when it comes to the witching hour pre-bedtime, but this really will not work if you’re set up as the bad cop, because you don’t want to add any further resentment to a situation they may already be struggling with (having a new step-parent in the first place).

Nor will it work if you’re the good cop, because there’s a very fine line between “good cop” and “soft touch”, and whatever about trying to get kids to like you, in my experience it’s more important, at least at first, that they respect you. Liking can come afterwards.

And it really helps, I’ve found, to talk to your partner about all of this, so that they can support you when those sticky moments come up. Sometimes, the boys will ask Brandin why I can’t be with Atlas so that he can be freed up to play with them, especially on weekends when I might be working a lot and he’ll look after Atlas so I can take a bath or read my book.

And at first, Brandin would tell them, “Rosemary’s been with Atlas all week, she needs some time to herself now”, but I realised this was, in a way, turning Atlas and me into a kind of obstacle that was somehow hindering their ability to spend time with their Dad.

So I sat Brandin down and told him this, and asked if he could, instead, take the blame – by saying he wanted to spend some time with Atlas, or that he just wasn’t in the mood to play catch right this second. Because even though they might be annoyed or disappointed with him, he’s their Dad – they have to love him anyway. Me, on the other hand…? The jury’s still out.

You won’t be their best friend

I remember, early on, someone on Instagram telling me – when I asked for step-parenting advice – to remember that they already had two parents, and that I should see myself as more of a friend than anything else.

And I like to think that I tried – I really tried – to be a friend to them. But the mistake I made was in thinking of myself as a peer, rather than an adult friend.

I went through a (very short, granted) period of trying not to be the one to admonish, correct, or discipline them, thinking that those were tasks that fell to their Mom and Dad, and not in my remit.

But, as it happens, what children value most is a steady hand – and, in that sense, they need all guidance and discipline to be constant, and to come from all of the adults in the house. It won’t work, if I ignore their arguments, or allow them to eat a bar of chocolate before dinner, or tell them they can play Fortnite when their Dad has expressly forbidden it, because not only does it undermine his authority, but it just makes life difficult for me, as I am forced to listen to them argue, or watch them leave their entire dinner, uneaten, or hear the ambient racket of children playing Fortnite.

I know I’m not their parent (noun), but I am someone who is responsible for parenting (verb) them, all the same. Which leads me nicely on to…

You won’t be their mom, either

I’ve never used the word “Mom” when describing myself and my relationship to the boys, except when it’s preceded by the word “step”, and even then, it’s rare that I give myself that title at all.

I feel as though it’s up to them, how they refer to and talk about me, and I don’t want them to feel forced into recognising or feeling a relationship to me that doesn’t feel natural.

Because that’s the thing: in the very basic, biological definition of things, I’m no relation to them. I didn’t birth them, and I wasn’t there for those early years of their lives. I can’t sign off on their medical procedures and I’m not the one they call out for in the middle of the night and I’m not the one who signs their school permission slips, even if I am sometimes the one who washes their baseball jerseys and drives them to practice and cleans the gross bits of food out of the bottom of their schoolbags.

In a lot of ways, step-parenting is a bit like regular parenting, just without all of the warm, fuzzy, gorgeous bits that make it all worthwhile. I have to manage their fights and moderate their screen time and cut the crusts off their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wash their underwear and make their beds and pick up the bits of ceramic that are all over the kitchen after they drop a plate but I’m still not the one whose lap they ever want to sit on.

When they hurt themselves, I’m not the one they run to, and when it’s time to go somewhere fun, 99.9999% of the time, I’m not the one they want to go with.

Sometimes, in fact, I feel pretty certain that they actively dislike me, and it’s hard to deal with that when you don’t feel like you can say things like, “Well, I’m sorry you hate me, but I’m your Mom and I love you” or “you are not getting out of this car until you say you love me too.” Us step parents do not get the luxury of forced affection.

And in those moments when they’re running around, making loud, repetitive snorting noises, shooting Nerf guns in the house even though they know they’re not allowed to, smashing Cheetos into the carpet that they should only ever have been eating in the kitchen for this very reason… I don’t have access to the same vast reserves of love that their Mom and Dad can tap into when they need to be reminded just how much they love these adorable little monsters.

Don’t take anything personally

This is something, you will be shocked to read, that I am famously bad at. I take offence easily, I read into everything that’s said to me, and I almost always jump to the worst possible conclusion.

Cashier in the supermarket is rude? She probably didn’t like my face. Someone’s laughing within earshot? They’re definitely laughing at me. The person sitting next to me in the library looks at me for a split second? They’re 100% judging my parenting.

So you can probably imagine how totally unbothered I am by the kind of casual insults that get thrown at you by children.

Ours are a bit old for the kind of innocently cutting insults you might get from a smaller child – my nephew once asked me, “why does your belly look like a burger?” – but there’s a lot of, “why can’t Rosemary do that?” (when their Dad says, “sorry, I can’t play with you right now because I’m making dinner / sitting with Atlas / cleaning out the kitty litter” and “I want Dad to come!” about, well, pretty much everything.

And I’ve sometimes found myself trying to appeal to their compassionate souls, telling them how bad it makes me feel when they (best case scenario) act indifferent to me, not to mention how much it hurts me when they treat me like “a bit of dirt on your shoe” (that was a last-minute improvisation when I realised I couldn’t very well say “shit”).

The thing is, and this has become my catchphrase at this point, it’s not about me. They don’t even really see me as a person, in the same way I didn’t see my parents as people, at least not really, until I was well into my twenties. And even if sometimes, I feel as though they hate me… they don’t.

They just really love their Mom and Dad, in a way that they won’t ever love me – and even though sometimes it’s a hard pill to swallow, it’s also something that makes perfect sense. It’s how I would want it to be, if Brandin and I ever broke up and one or both of us remarried.

They might hate that their parents aren’t together any more, and that they split their time between two separate households. They probably hate being told that “only boring people get bored”, and having it suggested to them that they fill their time by tidying their rooms, or putting away their clean laundry. They definitely hate to be reminded that they need to wash their hair tonight.

They have a lot of big feelings at this age, and most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Comparisons help no one

These boys – and this is the most galling thing, honestly – love their mom’s boyfriend, who they refer to as their stepdad to anyone who will listen. It’s an adoration I simply don’t think I’m getting from them when we’re not together, although I will accept that it is, at the very least, possible. Not probable, though. (I am definitely not getting it when we are together.)

Sometimes I try to comfort myself by telling myself, it’s because he’s a man and boys get on better with men or, it’s because he’s into wrestling and so are they.

But I think the first point is kind of rubbish, and as for the second, they’re only into wrestling because he and their Mom are into wrestling. It’s very clear that the chicken came before the egg in this scenario.

And the thing is, I don’t really have any interests that they share right now. I tried to get them into The Hunger Games, but they seemed deeply bored by the political scheming of it all; they do not want to learn to knit (but have been demanding incredibly intricate creations from me that I simply can’t produce); I’m not sure Love is Blind or Vanderpump Rules are going to appeal to them (although they’d probably like the swearing).

But I am trying to read to them at night – Finn and I are currently reading The Catstronauts while William and I are five chapters into Estranged – and once the weather gets nicer I’m hoping we can plant some things together and bond over the garden.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of beating their stepdad and his wrestling and the fact that he plays the drums, for crying out loud, but I don’t think it was meant to be a competition in the first place.

Highlight the positives

I don’t think there are all that many advantages to having a step-parent, at least from the kids’ point of view. Your parents got divorced, which sucks, right, and just when you’re beginning to see the silver lining of having each parent to yourselves for the first time, they meet someone new and their focus shifts away from you again. It must be hard.

But the one true high point of having separated parents?! You get double the presents at Christmas times and on birthdays – and, if your new step-parent’s parents are alive, you get double the grandparents presents, too.

I also try to go out of my way to buy them little things, at random times, just because I think they might like them or because I’m thinking of them. Some might see this as buying their love, but those people are very cynical. Not like me. I am just a glass-half-full, “look on the bright side” kind of gal.

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Hunter Harris

has been hosting chat threads for S6 of Love is Blind, and though I, too, have a chat thread… hers is better. She’s a great culture writer and deeply, deeply funny.

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We did a live Zoom book club on the podcast last week and it was so much fun! If you’ve never listened to Not Without My Sister there is never a bad time to start. This episode has, time and time again, been voted the listeners’ fave.

Cardi B got her Pucci inspo from Bea. iykyk