The stepparent’s crutch
There’s a job that can sometimes be even harder than being a stepfather, and that’s my wife’s task. She is the moderator, the referee between the stepfather who doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time and the daughters who would like to know who that grumpy man thinks he is. Mom, after all, is the one who invited/accepted me into their family. The girls kind-of sort-of got a vote, but it was ultimately their mom’s decision.
And that puts her in a pretty tough spot. For example, I don’t know how to tutor the pre-teen. I do a pretty good job with college students, but the 12-year-old feels so much pressure hearing a question from me that she’ll forget how many inches are in a foot. It’s not that she doesn’t know – it’s that I can be so overbearing while firing even simple questions at them that the answers hide behind a defensive wall in their brains. I throw my hands in the air, declaring to anyone who’ll hear me that I can’t work with this!
In steps their mom, able to leap tall communication gaps in a single comforting gesture. Back off, she tells me subtly, gently. You know this stuff, she tells the kid, coaxing the answer out of her.
I don’t envy my wife when it comes to that role. As parents, we’ve been a team less than a year. Now she spends as much time teaching me how to be a parent as she spends being a parent to the girls. I get the luxury of not getting it right all the time. The pressure on her is greater: she has to be right when I’m wrong, right when the kids are wrong, right when we’re all wrong. And she never has the right to be wrong. Ever!
Not fair. And all I have to do to resolve this unfairness is get it right all the time myself. Yeah, sure. I can do that.
Honestly, I think she has some idea how much I appreciate her. I know I’d be a flop as a stepfather if not for her support. I’d like to be just as supportive of her role.
But how?
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