Parenting: the hardest job in the world?

They say parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not having been a parent, I don’t know that I’m qualified to have an opinion about that. But who am I kidding…I have an opinion about everything. And in this instance, I beg to differ. I think there’s a job harder than parenthood: being a stepparent. If you’ve never had the opportunity, count your blessings.

Having children of your own, you are a part of every memory, every tradition, every milestone. You’re a part of who these people are. When you marry a parent, you not only become the second spouse (and don’t get me started on that…that’s a whole other blog post), you inherit stepchildren.  You’ve had none of the history, there’s no obligation (or inclination) on their part to love you…or even accept you. I think the stepparents who are lucky are the ones who marry the parent when the kids are young. They’re more pliable and have had less chance to be angry and jaded by the divorce. The possibility exists for you to be a part of their life, another person to love them. Which is really all a stepparent should hope for. A stepparent isn’t a parent…I’ve actually lived the cliché of having a stepchild throw the comment in my face—“you’re not my mother”. To which I responded (in my most adult voice), “Thank God for that!” Okay, not my finest hour…but you had to have been there….longest 6 months of my life. But I digress.

Adult stepchildren are the worst. To the new marriage, they bring all the anger from the divorce; all the hard feelings they have toward their parents…for which they’re looking for a receptacle and BINGO…there you are; the blame for their parent changing; the mirror your existence holds up in front of them that forces them to face the reality that their parents don’t love each other and at least one of them betrayed and abandoned them. A stepparent has to have really broad shoulders to carry that kind of burden. Fortunately for me, my shoulders are the size of the Grand Canyon…metaphysically speaking.

It helps that I love my husband very much and that we have the kind of relationship where we make our own rules and can find ways to live outside the box. You have to be willing to let go of expectations and dreams, forget about the Beaver Cleaver experience you had hoped for when you inherited a ready-made family. And that’s really the hardest part for me…because as a non-parent, being a stepparent is as close as I’ll get to having a child. And I brought an awful lot of assumptions, hopes, expectations and dreams to my marriage. Sadly, I think I placed too many of my eggs in the stepparent basket…I allowed that need, that desire, that expectation for family to take focus away from what really mattered in my marriage…my husband. What a blessing for me that my husband is that one-in-a-million man who loves me enough to work through all my baggage (a 12-piece set of Samsonite actually) to get to where we are today. Certainly not where we wanted to be, hoped to be, or assumed we would be…but a family nonetheless.