Wicked Stepmothers
Yesterday had some synchronicity. We are currently reading The Boys in the Boat as a family. I posted a quote from it yesterday. It’s a book about the collegiate rowing team that won the Olympics in 1936 but also a book about Joe Rantz, one of the rowers, struggling to achieve the perfect trust necessary for perfect rowing after a hardscrabble adolescence where he was abandoned by his dad at his stepmother’s behest during the Great Depression. She is the classic wicked stepmother, though the author works hard to give you perspective enough to see why she fell into the trap she did. You end up seeing her as more pathetic and meager than villainous.
Not Joe Rantz’s stepmother
Then yesterday I was linked to this mini-essay on wicked stepmothers. The writer first makes a point that the correlation between unrelated men in the home and physical or sexual child abuse is high. About 50x more likely if I recall (though still less likely than not). “Unrelated men in the home” = Mom’s boyfriends or Mom’s new husband. The Wicked Stepdad (or more commonly, the Wicked Stepboyfriend). She then says that similarly the stepmother is much more likely than a biological mother to be emotionally abusive. Its why wicked stepmothers pop up so much in fairy tales. She lays out a series of mechanisms and steps which are point for point what happened in The Boys in the Boat.
Note: the statistics do not mean that any given stepmother or stepfather, or even that stepfathers and stepmothers in general, are likely to be wicked. People have a hard time with statistics emotionally so I think its important to point that out. Most abusers are steps–true. Most steps are abusers–false.
E.C.
September 6, 2024
My mom is a good example of a non-wicked stepmother, I think. My dad had 5 kids already, and my mom was brave enough to agree to become a mother to them. It wasn’t easy, because their mom had been actually neglectful, and they weren’t used to having an authority figure at home all the time. There were some rip-roaring arguments and plenty of issues to work through, but 20 years later, everyone’s turned out pretty okay.
It helped that Mom had had a stepfather (a good one), so understood what boundaries she shouldn’t transgress. She never insisted my older siblings call her ‘mom’, for example.
Taking on that role can be incredibly difficult, and I’ve watched it go wrong in a bunch of ways in other families over the years.
John Mansfield
September 6, 2024
A 5 year old has no explicit memories of life before he was two, and a 2 year old has no memory of his first year, but they know they feel secure and loved with the woman who has been their daily companion since birth. Big shoes to fill without the shared history to draw on.
G.
September 7, 2024
E.C.,
Hats off to your Mom.
Eric
September 8, 2024
For more synchronicity, the day you posted this was the day of my mother-in-law’s funeral. One of her stepdaughters spoke, and started out by talking about how the deceased was most definitely not a wicked stepmother.
There have been some strained relationships between my mother-in-law and her stepchildren (mostly neglect on the children’s part in the years since their dad’s death), so it was nice to hear that from her.
I’ve long held the view that wicked stepmothers make such a compelling trope in fiction because mothers are expected to be selfless and nurturing to their children, so presenting a mother-figure as the opposite of that becomes very unsettling for the audience, even if they don’t comprehend why.