Oh, Gisele. Wrong move, sister.
Women have enough reason to hate the Brazilian beauty. All Gisele Bundchen has to do is smile, thrust out a sharp hip bone, and the world pays attention.
Then she had to go and unleash the primal fear of every divorced mother on the planet.
“I understand that he has a mom, and I respect that,” the 28-year-old model said, referring to John Edwards Thomas, the son of her new husband, Tom Brady, quarterback for the New England Patriots, had with his former girlfriend, Bridget Moynahan. “But to me, it's not like because somebody else delivered him, that's not my child … I love him the same way as if he were mine.”
While you're at it, Gisele, why not suggest that the toddler should be toilet-trained, if his mother were competent, and eating more fruits and vegetables?
The stepmother gig is more dangerous than a minefield. There will soon be more stepfamilies in North America than any other kind of family, according to some experts. And that means big potential for mothers to get their chocolate-chip cookies bent out of shape when dealing with stepmothers who, like Ms. Bundchen, are probably just trying to be maternal.
That may explain why books attempting to illuminate the territory – and its numerous hidden bombs – are the latest trend in divorce-related publishing.
“Structurally, you become the outsider and the interloper,” says Wednesday Martin, author of Stepmonsters: A New Look at Why Stepmothers Think, Feel and Act the Way They Do . At 35, Ms. Martin married a man who is seven years older and is the father of two girls. When she sought books on the issue, she found instruction on “the 10 things I could do to be a better stepmom, 25 ways to make life better for my spouse, and the 10 things my stepkids were feeling. … The emotional terrain of the stepmother and her own experiences is the piece of the puzzle that's missing.”
Many of the feelings are taboo. A stepmother may not love her stepchildren immediately, even though she is expected to. She may resent them. And she will be blamed if there is trouble, Ms. Martin says.
The failure rate of remarriages is high. In Canada, 20 per cent of second marriages end before the eight-year mark, according to 2006 Statistics Canada data. “Stepfamilies are lumpy,” says Ms. Martin, who went on to have two sons with her husband. (Ms. Bundchen is now reportedly pregnant with her first child.) “The words ‘blended family' set up the wrong expectation … and the stepmother, by the blended-family myth, is ratcheting up the pressure on herself.”
Carol Marine felt that pressure when she married David Marine almost 10 years ago. She was only 21 at the time, while he was 35 and the father of two girls, Sophie and Madeleine, then 9 and 5, respectively. “I knew it would be messy, but I didn't know how messy. I was naive,” she says.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Newcomb Marine, the girls' mother, was afraid that her ex's new wife was going to usurp her role. “It was like having a babysitter who moves in and you don't know her, you haven't vetted her, and yet she is given all this space to have a relationship with your kids,” Ms. Newcomb Marine says.
Both women, who live in and around Austin, Tex., decided to write a book about the dynamics of the fraught relationship between mothers and stepmothers, based on their own. “It's called No One's the Bitch because there is always the assumption that one side is,” says Ms. Newcomb Marine, a 44-year-old freelance writer. “With conflict, we always demonize the other person.”
