Step parenthood is such a difficult role.
Saturday Dialogue with Ropafadzo Mapimhidze
It often feels like the only one solidly on a woman’s side is the spouse and everyone else from the aunts to in-laws are against a stepmother.
No one applies to become a stepmother because there are so many circumstances that result in children being raised by either a stepmother or stepdad.
In the event that a man remarries following death or divorce, children remain locked in their old comfort zone that their parents nurtured.
And hence the sight of a stepdad or stepmum gives them the feeling of being abandoned, although this may not necessarily be the case.
Years ago, I was told of a high school girl who left a recorded message that went like this: “Am busy right now . . . but if it is my stepmother go to hell . . . ”
These are some of the experiences step parents especially stepmothers have to put up with when they marry a man that has children from a previous relationship.
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The feuds between a stepmother and stepchildren is visible because it is the woman that spends most of the time with these children. There are weird stories that I have heard of stepchildren who sometimes plan to murder their stepmother because they have choked the space which was once occupied by their mother.
Children generally remain faithful to their biological mother’s even beyond the grave.
One stepchild told her stepmother that she was a whore that made her mum leave their home. All hell broke loose as the two fought with words and eventually developed into a fight.
One stepmother has confessed that she does not dislike her stepdaughters, but it does not feel the same when it’s her own child.
A colleague, whose mother died when she was very young, had a stepmother for more than 30 years. She tells me that she has always liked her, but that they are not super close. She has always thought of her as her “stepmother” and never her “mother,” even though she was raised by her.
Another woman in her late 50s says she was left with her grandmother when her dad went to war. This is because her mother decided to marry nearly four times, but failed in those marriages because she thought her first husband had perhaps died during the war of liberation.
Then Zimbabwe became independent, when he returned home to find a deserted residence in one of the rural areas. He remarried shortly afterwards.
But this did not go down very well with this daughter. She hated both her stepmother and stepfather.
She would shout on the phone telling her father that she hated his wife . . . and she also did the same to her mother, telling her she hated her husband. Her mother had never looked for her and her two siblings and only resurfaced five years after independence.
“My mother’s village is not far from where we lived. But she never made an effort to look for us and now she wants to come because we are now adults leading successful lives . . . hell no,” she said a few years ago before she suffered a heart attack and passed on.
She was a bitter woman.
“I told her she was no different from a baby dumper and I made it clear to her that I would never set a foot at her home.
“I also told my father exactly the same message that I also hated his wife,” said the woman when she was still alive.
This clearly goes to show that there are so many psychological issues that affect stepchildren and there is really not much of a method or formula to correct or bring love between these parties.
But there are, however, some exceptional stepmothers that have successfully raised stepchildren to the extent that they shun their biological mothers. I have a friend who was raised by a stepmother from the time she was one and a half years old.
Whenever she received her pay, we would go window shopping and when she found something nice she would ask me . . . “Who should I buy this . . . my biological mother or my stepmother . . ?”
She always settled for her stepmother. And when her biological mother died, she attended the funeral and burial, but felt very odd.
“I felt nothing . . . I mean just nothing. My stepmother died many years later and I am the one who paid for the grave and tombstone. I visit her grave site every year. I really miss her and wish she had lived longer to see my children, who are now fully grown-up adults.”
When you are parenting, they are all your children although some parents wonder how they can be fair while still maintaining the trust of their biological children.
“But in a blended family, you have to keep those thoughts in a separate compartment from parenting,” says Empowering Parents, a website I found on Internet.
“Understand that when you’re parenting, they’re all your kids. And believe me, they’re all watching the way you behave yourself, the kind of role model you are, and the kinds of things you do.
“So when the children start acting out and the television is taken away for the evening as a consequence, it’s not taken from the biological kids or the non-biological kids — you don’t get into those distinctions. It’s taken away from all the kids. And so it also becomes, ‘When we’re going to the park, we’re all going to the park — the whole family.’ Or “When we’re watching a movie, we’re all watching a movie’.” Feedback:[email protected]
