I have this joke I do on stage. It’s a throwaway line that always gets a laugh: ‘I breastfed all my kids, except my stepdaughter. Her mum got a bit weird about it.’ It’s funny because it’s true.
Being a stepmother is not something any of us plans. To be honest, until I had my first baby I’d never given much thought to becoming a mother to my own biological kids, let alone someone else’s. But loving a man with a daughter means to love that man, you also love his daughter. It’s a package. You just have to hope that the daughter is prepared to love you. Or at the very least, tolerate you.
I first met Rachel as a school friend of my daughter’s. She would have been six years old. A smiling child with long brown plaits and a perfect fringe. She was the girl I’d suggest my daughter played with at school. She was kind and easy-going. My daughter had a ‘separated’ family, and so did she. I thought they might understand each other in the way only six-year-olds can. Years later I fell in love with her dad and the child who’d come for playdates and sleepovers, the kid I’d taken to Brisbane to see Avril Lavigne, was my stepdaughter. Just like that. No long pregnancy, no stretch marks, no waking in the night. I had a perfectly formed, perfectly wonderful 12-year-old daughter.
There are no cards that say ‘It’s a girl! Congratulations on your new stepdaughter’. There should be. Children are not a burden. They’re a gift. And being loving, and being loved by someone not in your biological shadow is a privilege.
The stepmother trope is beset with danger. In fairy tales, the stuff kids read before they meet you, the stepmother represents evil – she is rage, envy, resentment, greed and self-absorption. She is wicked. She mistreats the naive innocent girl, and eventually the girl triumphs and the stepmother ends up being banished to a bird cage, turns into a puff of smoke, or she dies some hideous death. This was not an outcome I was relishing. I’m a big personality but I’m not a psychopath. I don’t have a crow on my shoulder or a magic mirror.
At worst, I’m embarrassing. At best, I’m your protector, your champion, and the mum who nothing shocks. I’ve never been great on boundaries and discipline, or baking. My mum superpowers have always been more towards acceptance and love. I’m a vault. You can tell me anything. I’m a safe place.
That’s how I approached the role. Having kids myself, I realised that the idea of a stepmother is not to replace the mother, but to augment. To create an alternate maternal role built on deep care and friendship. The trick was to realise that there are times to step forward, and times when you step back. It was generally easy, but at times it was hard. There’s no template for how you do it. You have to work it out.
Stepparenting means you have someone else’s child in your house. Yes my husband’s. But another mother’s child too. The story of their relationship – the one that precedes you, where she was made – the joy, the hope and the heartbreak, lives in her origin story. It is a fragile, important part of her, and you cannot break it. That is what evil stepmothers do. Good stepmothers allow the stories of their husband and their stepdaughter’s past to live alongside untouched, as one of many concurrent narratives of how you all got there.
And when she left after her weekend, or week with us, she’d step into her other story. The bit that we weren’t in. Loving her meant constantly embracing her hello, then waving goodbye.
Rachel accepted me from day one. She was open and loving and excited to be part of a new big family. She was soft, and caring, and had a capacity for wisdom beyond her years. I never called her my stepdaughter. It’s a word that creates separation and I worried it would make her feel weird. It was important to me that she never felt different to the other kids. Having five kids, with a parentage of three fathers and two mums, kind of made it easier. You’re not really the odd one out when everyone else is a bit odd too. I just refer to her as my daughter. But she is someone else’s daughter first. I came later.
She’s 28 now. In a few weeks she will get married. And then she becomes part of an even wider family and possibly has her own. It made me reflect on being a stepmother.
On what it is to love a child. And what it is to let go.
Maybe it’s time we rewrote those fairy tales. About stepmums who are wicked good.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
