The people who know Kathy more than they know me, but who are maybe more casual friends or less often in touch friends or friendly acquaintances — those people seem a little more wary. And it’s weird for me. I’m not used to having people’s first reaction to meeting me be wariness. I’m not used to the unconscious immediate shape other people sense around me being one that looks a little dangerous or menacing or scary or hurtful.

And when I meet people who don’t know Kathy, if I mention that I’m a stepmom (if it seems relevant — say I’m meeting them at a school event or outside a music lesson, for example), the reaction is usually the same. Wariness. People get suddenly quiet. They look uncomfortable. They look away. The conversation ends abruptly.

It’s not the same if I leave the stepmom part out. It’s not the same at all. If I leave the stepmom part out, small talk is no problem. People I’ve just met look open and interested. We find things we have in common. We usually part with smiles and friendly ideas about each other, whether or not we ever plan to run into each other again or think we’d make good friends.

Whhhyyyyyyyyyyy????????????

Maybe it’s because people don’t know what to say. Maybe they feel like I’m laying something heavy on them when we’re barely acquaintances. Maybe there’s no safe, standard, conversation building small-talk response. (If that’s the case, maybe we should invent some.) Maybe they’re afraid of wandering into the middle of an extended stepfamily minefield. (“If I’m friendly with the stepmom, that might make the mom mad or hurt or uncomfortable. People might get unpleasantly emotional. I barely know anyone here myself and don’t want to start off in the middle of a fight. I don’t even know the mom or the dad or the situation. I don’t want to take sides.” That sort of thing.) Maybe it’s that I represent something scary: divorce, moving on, remarriage, and then having to share children with an adult you didn’t pick. Who wants to think about that? Any of it? I wouldn’t either. It’s horrifying in the abstract. It’s not so horrifying in real life. And that’s scary, too, in and of itself. And here I am, an in-the-flesh representative of it. I might look away and end a conversation abruptly, too, in other shoes. I might not be able to think of anything to say, either.

Sometimes I feel really lonely. And hypersensitive. And a little scared. Around mommy bloggers. And at some real-life school events. I hate feeling rejected or left out or invisible or shunned or radioactive.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t always feel that way. People can be surprising and warm and welcoming. But I do feel this way much more in woman-centered and kid-centered events than I did before I became a stepmom. Men don’t particularly seem to care, which is wonderful, but not that helpful. I’m not usually looking for a bunch of new guy friends. I’m usually looking to connect with other women — the mommies (married, divorced, remarried — you name it), the stepmoms, the aunties — the women with kids in their lives.

What to do about it? Well, the only thing I can think of right now is to resolve that when I’m out and about, I will not see scary shapes and blind spots too uncomfortable to focus on. I will see people. I can try not to pass this particular kind of pain on. Not by being a do-gooder, but by trying to see people as people — not as scary symbols — much more often. And when I’m feeling it myself, I’ll try to get my mind off myself by looking for anyone else who might be feeling it for other reasons and see if I can strike up a little human-to-human connection — even if it’s just eye-contact, or a friendly smile (if it’s real), or small talk. When I’m feeling that particular kind of pain, I can try to use it as a prompt override my hide-and-melt tendencies and reach out in a way that might help me and someone else, too.

The other thing I’ll do (hey that’s two things!) is that I’ll love the heck out of the people who interact with me primarily in my stepmom role, but who still see me instead of a scary blurry spot. Like Kathy’s friends, for starters.

What else to do about it? I’m not sure yet. I want to be able to introduce myself as a stepmom and have the conversation keep growing and expanding and bubbling along in the comfortable way it would if I had been a mom or an aunt or a godparent — or just silent about what I really was — instead.

We played a game once at work called “The Saboteur”. We were divided into teams. Every team would have a saboteur — someone whose job it was to secretly undermine the team’s project without being caught. One by one we were called up to the front of the room to be shown a card telling us whether we were to be saboteurs or regular players. We watched each other walk and thought about each other’s posture and facial expressions and what they could mean. Walking back, being watched this way, was odd, too. I was a normal player. But it still felt strange to be scrutinized and suspected.

The game was hard. A maze (on graph paper) had been posted out of sight, around the corner. We had to first recreate the maze by going, one at time, to look at it, and then coming back and drawing as much of it as we could remember. There were four of us, and we could only look at it so many times without losing points for our team. We were racing against a bunch of other teams, and we were told that once we had a suspected saboteur, we could kick them out of the group to go sit in a “saboteur chair” so that they wouldn’t negatively affect the group anymore. If we started to think we’d been wrong, we could let them back in and kick someone else out if we liked.

I bet you’re already guessing that there weren’t any saboteurs. Our group suspected this and made a pact at the beginning that we wouldn’t kick anybody out and that we’d trust each other. But still, whenever someone came back and drew a piece of the maze that didn’t fit with what others of us remembered, we wondered. We suspected them. Other teams were kicking people out right and left. Maybe we’d guessed wrong. Maybe we did have a saboteur. Maybe our saboteur was having a field day. The problem was, all of us came back from around the corner at one point or another with memories of the maze that didn’t fit with what the rest of the group had down. And it could have just been that what we were doing was hard and that human brains aren’t entirely foolproof. We decided to keep trusting each other.

Eventually, we got it right. I don’t remember if we won or not, but we definitely didn’t lose. And we were right about the saboteurs. There weren’t any. The point of the game had been to show us how easy it was, especially under pressure and especially with a complicated task, to suspect or be suspected. We all saw cunning or undermining — even our team with our pact — when all that was there was trying and sometimes fumbling.

“All appears to change when we change.” — Henri Amiel

I didn’t always know Kathy the way I know her now. In the second half of our interview at Continuing the Stepparenting Journey, I told Karon that Kathy is “flexible, warm, open, willing to keep showing up and trying, and willing to start over and over again” and that I loved her, and Karon suggested jokingly that maybe we could clone Kathy. The thing is, I didn’t always know that I had this treasure in Kathy.

There was a time — when we were both deep in protection mode — when I saw her as unreasonable and unpredictable and when I was scared of the havoc she could wreck — and that sometimes I thought she was wrecking. The funny thing about going into protection mode — whether we’re protecting kids, ourselves, our homes, our reputations, our partners, our boundaries, our feelings, our money or anything else — is that it’s one tiny step from good guy/bad guy mode. And going into good guy/bad guy mode is about as effective as trying to drive on the freeway while looking through fun-house mirror goggles. We can’t really, truly see the territory or the other people anymore, and the potential for doing damage — without realizing that our perception is leading us to steer in ways that can cause accidents — is huge.

It took me the longest time to figure out that I even had these goggles on. I’m so sorry.

“Part of what I felt in the marriage and after, was abandonment. Not where he would leave for days on end or anything, but rather that he was constantly at work. It seemed to me that he did not want to make time for me or that I was not important enough. (again, this was my perception of how things were) These feelings were magnified when I saw that he had started taking off days of work to be with her and the kids.

It left even worse thoughts of ‘why was I not good enough to do this for’ etc… I don’t believe that I disliked her or tried to be mean on purpose, or out of the simple fact that she did anything wrong, but rather she took my place. She was getting what I had so longed for. She had the relationship that I should have had.

I then had the fear that my ex would want to take the kids away so that they could be one big happy family. (without me) Because why would I need to be in the picture, I’d been replaced. This brought out the very basic instinct to hold onto my kids tighter then I had ever done before.” (Read the whole post here)

Today over at the real world Lori shared some of the things she realized she had to work through years ago on the mom side of a new mom-stepmom relationship. This is such a helpful post in beginning to understand and empathize with the pain some moms feel in these situations.

Lori wrote a post a few days ago at The real world about how upsetting it was for her to find so many stepmom blogs that put down biomoms, and without naming names or linking, she gave a few examples of things she’d read online that disturbed her. People recognized them, and a big kerfuffle ensued. Here’s what I think: Most stepmoms desperately want to be understood, appreciated, loved, supported, and accepted. And I think — just because of how mixed up the world is — those are very hard things for most stepmoms to get.

I remember early in my relationship crying and saying, “I’m not a Buddha. I’m not a saint. This isn’t fair. It’s like people expect me to be a saint. I’m just a person.” I remember feeling like what my new community and family were expecting of me was to attain Mother Teresa levels of enlightenment just to be accepted. I hated it. No one seemed interested in my perspective, my feelings, my hopes and dreams, my hurts and disappointments. The demands looked like Mount Everest, the level of support was nil. I was mad. I was living in hell. I got tired of it. And I came to see that I was standing at a door. It was a door I’d seen before in my life. Every time I see it, it’s harder to go through. And every time I make my way through it, I’m back in heaven. It’s the grow or stay stuck in despair door. It’s the door where I have to let go of my ideas about the way things are supposed to be, and where I have to come to terms with, accept, and love what is. Every growth spurt I go on, I learn more about letting go. Feeling stuck is so painful, and the release of finally growing again is bliss. There is so much we can’t control. It’s so easy to hurt people without meaning to. There is so much we don’t know. Over and over I get stuck, and over and over I find myself at this door. And every time it’s harder to go through. But every time, my heart grows a little bit more. Every time, I am a little bit freer.

So, is being part of a stepfamily worth it? For me the answer is yes, yes, yes and yes. Not because it’s easy, but because it has been the crucible I’ve grown the most in so far. My heart feels about six times bigger. After going through that door in my stepfamily — the grow or stay stuck in despair door — I realized on the other side that it’s not like my family or community is purposefully withholding something from me that they could just give me if they weren’t so perverse. They’re confused and in pain, too. There are no grownups, really, at the end of the day. There’s just all of us — confused, hurt people who used to be kids and who somehow are now running families and the world. Everyone is in pain. And the older we get, the more painful life is going to get, whether we live in stepfamilies or not. Life is beautiful, but it’s always going to be interlaced with pain. Growing means saying yes to that, and working with that.

Some of us will deal with cancer. Some of us will have family members die young. Some of us will lose children. Some of us will deal with bankruptcy. Some of us will have our marriages come apart. Some of us will die young ourselves. Some of us will lose our health.

No matter what, we will encounter excruciating pain as we continue living. Do we give up and die? No way. We accept that these are the terms of life, and we do whatever we can, everywhere we can, to add to the beauty.

So, back to the original discussion — should frustrated stepmoms vent on the internet and say put downs about the biomoms in their lives, even if the biomoms are way, way out of line? I don’t know.

On the one hand, if I was a biomom who felt really, really frustrated and really, really misunderstood, and I found a site where I was being talked about as if I were crazy and negligent, it would hurt a lot. It would hurt deeply. I would probably feel like striking out even more. (And I do think it’s hard to stay anonymous over time — over the years people do sometimes find each other online. The internet is much more public, searchable, and permanent than it feels most of the time. It’s a little bit like a CB radio station that anyone can tune into, and where permanent public transcripts are always on file.)

On the other hand, they’re just words. Publishing a perspective doesn’t make it true — it’s just a perspective. It doesn’t redefine other people’s identities. The only identities we have any real power over are our own. People know they’re just reading one side of a story. Sometimes I think if we get all our ideas out in the open, we can start to see them more clearly, we start to see where we want to grow, and we start to see what we don’t want to accept anymore in our relationships. Sometimes getting the words out helps us through the slow process of moving in a better direction. Also, getting the words out in the open means people who have different interpretations have a chance to argue back. It’s pretty rough and tumble, and no one likes baring their soul to the world and then feeling attacked, but I think it’s kind of the nature of the internet. And it’s not the worst thing that could happen.

Does venting help? I don’t know. It has never helped me. But other people who I respect and care about say that it helps them. Does saying put downs or using unflattering names for a biomom help? I can’t imagine how it would help, or how it would be good for a kid for one parent to even think about another one of their parents using put downs, but we’re all doing the best we can. And sometimes the best we can do is to try to vent in a place that feels safe and secret and where we hope the people in our lives won’t find it. I don’t do it because I’ve discovered in my own situation that I can just talk to Kathy about what’s bugging me. I might be shaking. I might be crying with fear and anxiety. I might have heartburn. But when I tell her what’s going on with me, as cleanly as possible, with no accusations or blame or trying to hurt her — just the cleanest expression of my feelings possible — it always takes us better places. It scares me shitless. I’m a pretty timid person. But it’s only ever made things better between us. If I hadn’t discovered that I could do that with Kathy, I might be venting on the internet right now, too.

I think online kerfuffles like we just had are a sign of health. They’re a sign that ideas are moving back and forth across the internet. Sometimes hurt, anger and outrage are signs that perspectives are colliding and in the process, a few ideas are making their way back and forth. I think that as long as we’re not hurting each other physically and we keep talking — as long as we keep showing up to the table — we’re going to go in good directions over time.

It’s okay not to always feel warm and fuzzy. We can feel hurt, angry, outraged, and misunderstood. It doesn’t have to mean we hate each other. We can keep trying to understand and be understood. I think that would be the most beautiful thing that could happen.