happy stepmother’s day!
may 18th, 2014
now do you know what today is? it’s interesting because even the people who are supposed to be recognized today most likely have no idea it exists. there actually is such a thing as National Stepmother’s Day. the third sunday in may. there are no advertisements for it, no spouses and stepchildren scrambling through stores searching for the perfect gift to say “thank you”. this day will go by as every day does for most stepmothers; with no recognition. no appreciation. in short; no one gives a shit. this is surprising to me given the growing number of stepfamilies in our country. divorce and remarriage are everywhere. stepmothers are spreading around the globe like cancer. and treated as such. you either are a stepparent, have a stepparent or know a stepparent. and yet still the world is trying to ignore our existence. we aren’t asking to be recognized on mother’s day anymore, we got the shit beat out of us over that one. now we have our very own holiday, one day out of 365 when the stepmother is to be, dare I say, honored. appreciated. loved? well now i’ve gone way too far.
perhaps we have walt disney to blame for the bitter taste in ones mouth when we say “stepmother”. but at least he gave us a role in the family. can’t say the same for the mothers. he killed those poor bitches off in the first scene. but not all stepmothers are wicked. most of us are pretty freakin fantastic. 
i choose to honor all the courageous souls who have been CHOSEN to take on this challenge. God is too smart to make mistakes. he elects only the strongest, most resilient, most empathic, and those with the greatest capacity to love for this gig. he knows how extrafreakinordinary you are. he made you this way on purpose. because even though they don’t know it, and you probably don’t either, those kids need you. and so does your spouse.
think of what goes into the decision to marry someone who doesn’t have kids. there’s a helluva lot of contemplating, probably years of auditioning for one another (unless you’re one of those vegas brides). a whole lot of pros and cons and that’s just to decide whether to share your life with ONE person. now think of what goes into the decision to marry a person with kids. all the above times the amount of children he has plus there’s your ability and willingness to deal with the kids mom to factor in. you’ll have to agree to give up the honeymoon period, the newlywed year when you’re supposed to have sex all over the kitchen 8 times a day without having to worry about children around to get grossed out and traumatized. you’ll have to give up your social life and weekend date nights because you’ll have the kids on weekends even when you two have worked so hard all week that you barely got to speak to one another. you will always be married with kids, there will never be a time when it will just be the two of you. the exciting milestones in your life that you have waited for FOREVER that will make you so freaking happy you’ll want to explode -your wedding, the birth of your own children, etc. you’ll celebrate quietly because they’ll bring pain and mixed emotions to his children which will bring stress and worry to your husband. the child in you will resent them for that. the adult in you will try hard not to. the marital challenges you two will have he never had to face the first time around because there wasn’t a divorce, or hurt children. and even after ALL that thinking and determining, after you’ve made the decision to love everyone he comes with, to sacrifice, to open your home, life and heart to all of them, you STILL had no freaking idea what you were getting into and you’ll want to punch the people who insist you must have.
your marriage begins when everyone else in the family has reached their wit’s end. so basically your marriage has all the makings for a nuclear disaster and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t want to bolt out of it at least once a week. and yet you stay. we stay. because there will never be anything we do that is more challenging therefore nothing could ever be as rewarding. even when no one acknowledges the things you have given up, changed, done YOU know how far you’ve come. how much you’ve grown. how great you feel during a bonding moment with your stepchild. YOU are proud of yourself. and you damn well should be.
i always say the ingredients to make a stepmom are:
1. marry a man with kids
2. have 1000 layers of skin
3. possess the ability to bite a hole through your tongue.
the ingredients to survive being one:
1. expect NOTHING. then instead of being disappointed, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
2. keep on doing the next right thing.
the ingredients to make a successful stepmom:
i have no fucking idea. i’m not that good a cook.
so HAPPY STEPMOTHER’S DAY to all my soul sisters out there!!!! and if you have a stepmother in your life choose today to not be an asshole to her. she is not your mother which is all the more reason to thank her for what she does for you. just in case i’m the only person to appreciate you today you could always pretend you got these cards in the mail: 
and to the three gifts in my life i am eternally grateful i chose; Casey, Cameron and Christian- being your stepmother is my greatest challenge and greatest reward. you are free to hate me, like me, tolerate me or love me. i have and will continue to make many mistakes as your stepmom. i have done and will continue to do many good things as your stepmother as well. remember we are all navigating through unfamiliar, uncomfortable territory together as a stepfamily. trying to draw lines within boundaries and love is like creating a piece of artwork. it can be as beautiful or as disastrous as we choose to make it. i promise to try to be a grown up even though you know it goes against everything i am! and no matter how tumultuous things may get between us over the years ahead know that you will always be my Princess Buttercup, my Teeny and my Tiny. but don’t let things get too tumultuous cause karma’s a bitch and you never know, one day you may become a stepparent! 
lastly, to my husband who made me a stepmother-i’m getting you back one pet at a time……. 
get smart
since we last met (forever and a month ago) there have been some changes. the twins are out of diapers (hallelujah) which briefly made me consider renaming this blog but then i figured before we know it my husband will be wearing them so it’ll make sense again soon enough. we are currently in a terrifying phase of parenting as we now have three full-fledged teenagers and two 3-year-old rock em sock em robots. by the time the youngest turn 18 i’ll feel like i earned a phd in psychology along with a black belt in jujitsu. having a teenager is maddening challenging, having three at the same time is downright torture and having them be your step kids is well…. 
there are two necessary ingredients to be able to successfully parent teenagers. unfortunately this formula requires us stepmomsters be sacrificed. i’d like to share these secret ingredients with you as a way to thank you for still reading this blog after a hiatus longer than the ones the writers of “mad men” take. the two ingredients you need in order to survive raising teenagers with your sanity intact are: 1. a stepmother in the anastasi-peter-webster’s dictionary ‘stepmother’ by definition means SCAPEGOAT. teenagers need someone to blame. for their failed tests, their bad hair days, their breakups, their hangovers, why the world is round….their irrational blame and hormone driven rages are usually directed towards mom or dad unless they have a step parent. the step parent’s role is crucial because when is a scapegoat needed more in our lives than during adolescence? up until our kids turn 13 all the damage of our, just face it, piss poor parenting through the years has been hidden under the disguise of that adorable, precocious, funny, sweet, sensitive little love of our lives. brace yourself because d-day is quickly coming when it will be impossible to hide from the monsters we’ve built from scratch since the hormones have unleashed the beast within. ladies, TRUST ME on this. it matters not if any of you are still in love with your husbands, DIVORCE HIS ASS when your oldest kid turns 12. give him the cars, the house, and the family dog if he agrees to remarry immediately. enjoy single life, sow your wildest oats, comfort your preteen through the divorce adjustment period and then enjoy the get- out- of- hell- free card while you sit back and watch your kid unleash his teenanger on their stepmother for the next 6 years. feel free to add your two cents as often as possible, it will only help your cause. if you don’t want your teens turning on you, you’d better make damn sure they’re turning on her. remember, it’s much easier to hate a stepparent than it is to hate a parent so you really can’t lose. who cares if the poor woman feels like this at the end of each day: 
she’s serving a higher purpose and don’t all of us stepmoms “know what we’re getting into” before we marry a man with kids anyway? can you tell i’m trying not to scream? husbands, please don’t object to this plan. it works in your favor too. your teens will let you off the hook for every time you miss their school plays and baseball games as long as you remarry before they turn 13. use that adorable 12 year old you made to suck that unsuspecting victim right in. and let’s not leave out how fun it will be to get to boink somebody new for a few years (until she blows her brains out or divorces you). that reminds me, you should probably get a prenup before embarking on this experiment. oh, and make sure she doesn’t have kids of her own cause i shudder to think what happens to stepfathers…. 2. a spy. 
gone are the days the mother could open her daughters top drawer and snoop through her diary by opening the lock that never even locked. now, if kids journal they do it on their laptops protected by a special journal passcode as well as a computer passcode. they now have cell phones allowing them to sext, bully, snapchat their boobies, and there’s probably an app to buy weed. many of them have cars and tell you they are going here when really they are going there. in short, we have no fucking idea what our kids are doing. i was a high school drama teacher for a total of two years too many and i can’t tell you how many parents would brag about their kids to me and i didn’t even recognize who the hell they were talking about. “my daughter deserves the lead in the play because she’s worked so hard the last few years and i’ve never seen a 16-year-old with so much focus and discipline.” meanwhile on this planet i’d never seen her daughter NOT stoned and she hadn’t completed an assignment for me in a year and half. let me be super duper clear-i am judging no parent. i am blaming no parent. i am in the same sinking ship with the rest of you. so i’ve decided to do something about it. i became a detective. i am a private investigator which makes me a licensed bullshit detector. with 5 kids most of my cases will likely be within my own family so i’ve basically gone from a ‘stay at home’ mom to a ‘working from home’ one. the verdicts still out over whose more disturbed by my career- the kids or the husband…. i just can’t stand feeling powerless against what’s to come armed only with a stack of parenting books that all contradict each other. i hear there are people out there who have this parenting thing DOWN. who have a wonderful relationship with their teenagers, whose kids are happy, well-adjusted, and don’t have a single STD. so it made me wonder, are these families immune to dysfunction? are their teenagers missing the self-destructive gene? or could it be that while everybody else has been hoping against hope this “friend trend” approach to parenting works, these better parents quickly saw where that was heading and opted to give “creepy as hell” a shot instead? perhaps they adopted a drug sniffing german shepherd because whoever keeps electing labs as the most family friend dog clearly has never had a teenager. if you wanna be moms best friend you better be able to find the pot stashed throughout the house. think of how many crises, therapy bills and wrinkles we could prevent if we started TAPPING THEIR SHIT. put spyware on their phones. gps trackers on their cars, cameras in their rooms and all around the house. and as soon as it becomes legal, MICROCHIP the shit outta them. tag those limbs up. by 13 they’ve totally forgotten all the “good choices” we encouraged them to make as toddlers, so it’s our job to do the right thing to prevent them from doing the wrong one. protect our teens. spy on their asses. they deserve it. after all they really can’t help that nothing they say will be anywhere near true for 5-6 years….right? 
imagine these scenarios: the next time your son tells you he absolutely DID NOT shoot up in his room last night you could take the doubt, gut feeling and parental denial right out of it and rooooooollllllllll the tape! when your daughter tells you she’s working on a project at a girlfriends house and you check in with your trusty gps tracker to discover she’s at her parent-less boyfriends house, you waltz right in with your weapons of mass destruction rip her out by her hair and sleep peacefully that night knowing you’re another day farther away from being a grandparent. while your reading your sons deleted text messages (thanks to spyware) and see he hasn’t told you he has been threatened by a group of punks, you raise holy hell until the bastards are suspended or arrested. than bask in the parental high of knowing thanks to your super sleuthing instead of having to use your husband’s hard-earned money to pay the plastic surgeon to fix your boys mangled mug, you can use it to have your very own cosmetic surgery of choice. if you’re one of the parents whose offspring have made it to 18 without getting pregnant or arrested, sure that’s something you’ll have over all your friends, but don’t get too cocky, college is right around the corner…. the point is this, we gotta be 3 steps ahead of these teens, folks, or they’re going to destroy us all one wrinkle at a time. we’re not allowed to beat em anymore so if we can’t beat em, creep em. they are younger, better looking and better at technology than us. we are fucked if we don’t get creepy. be warned they’ll despise you for a decade for spying on them so in case you’re not comfortable with that get yourself in therapy until you realize that letting your children hate you is a gift, letting them lie to you is irresponsible parenting. then when they flip their shit and scream: “DID YOU REALLY BUG THE HOUSE AND TAP MY PHONE?!” you’ll feel perfectly justified in saying (click below): http://www.tubechop.com/watch/2255640 or you could just tell them their creepy stepmoms the one who’s been spying…… what do you think? leave me a comment and let me know. should teenagers have a right to privacy? to what extent? did you deserve the privacy you had when you were a teen? who’s out shopping for a stepmom right about now?
diaperbaggage 