The DHX: The Doughtie Houses Exchange

Now that I’ve changed jobs to work closer to home, Jill and I have been getting together for a weekly lunch. This has been great and I look forward to it every week. Mostly we yak about girl stuff — relationships, hopes, fears — but it’s also a chance to sneak in a few logistics and household things. What’s great is that it’s 90% girlfriend talk and reminds us both that we are far more than just the other woman player in the game of moving the kids through their lives.

The other day we stumbled on something interesting. I’ve noticed — and I could be wrong — that the preponderance of internet blogging and commenting about this whole step-moms/bio mom issue is being conducted by the step-moms of the world. The bio moms simply don’t seem as caught up about it.

It came up when I was talking with Jill and saw how visibly and profoundly upset she was about how step-moms are generally perceived at first glance. She’s been to school functions where she introduces herself and people immediately shut down or voices drop in a tone of commiseration. It’s like it’s a disease that she caught and everyone is trying to be kind about it. Gently moving away from “it” and talking about other things.

And I got what she was saying and thought, man, if people treated me like that I’d definitely be vocal about my outrage too. I got it. That SUCKS.

Now, it’s true, over time that initial reaction has changed as people in our circle have gotten to know Jill as a person. Being a great human being helps a lot in that regard. But what is it about this thing we have, collectively, about step mothers?

I have a theory. And this comes from what I’ve been dealing with in my other relationship a lot over the past two months. I think this collective thing about step moms is a manifestation of shadow, that ugly scary part of us that we can rarely see in ourselves, except as reflected in others.

Usually shadow is discussed in terms of romantic relationships, and I’ve been working out all sorts of interesting things with this guy I’ve been seeing as we continue to explore the dance we dance with each other. Shadow in romantic partners is usually manifested in weird anger, sarcasm, the maddening and mesmerizing push/pull of attraction and repulsion, fear and dependency, anger and jealousy. My shadow will cause me to project all sorts of ugly characteristics upon him, thus enabling me to either detach, or find fault, or express anger that I’m too scared to approach directly.

The thing about shadow work is that you almost never get to confront your own directly. Shadow is a tricky, peripheral character, which is really only captured by reflecting on someone else. Shadow appears in personal relationships, in the relationships between countries, in politics (don’t get me started), in our culture. And I think that, for eons, we have collectively thrown a lot of shadow onto the archetype of the step-mother.

Think of how the step-mother is portrayed in literature and film. Sorry this is getting rough, but let’s open this up a bit. What’s the word that almost always precedes “step-mother”? Right: wicked. It’s true. Or evil. You have Snow White, Cinderella, the amazing Susan Sarandon in Enchanted with her twitching tongue and hideous cackle. It’s very noteworthy when a step-mother is seen as a whole person, as she is in Juno. Otherwise, she’s a shadow character — manipulative, sneaky, undermining, catty, jealous and self-centered.

Where does this come from? It’s so pervasive we don’t even think about it too much. But when you suddenly become that character, it must be just unbearably enraging to have that entire collective stereotype painted all over you, like a big red letter S.

I think it’s because we as a society, can’t bear to attribute many of these shadow qualities to another group of women who also share in them equally: mothers. I mean — can’t mothers also be manipulative and sneaky and undermining? You freaking betcha they can. In spades. Can’t mothers be jealous and self-centered? Ah… duh. These are not qualities that are only owned by step-mothers. These are shadow feminine qualities. And for some reason it’s easier to dump them on the minority (not so minor a minority any more) than to own them, as all women, ourselves.

The painfully fascinating thing about shadow, is that the shadow qualities that annoy the heck out of us in the Other are usually the qualities that are most prevalent in ourselves. Yup. You heard me. And this goes both ways, whether you’re a biological or step mom or in any way dealing with another woman in the raising of some children. Take a look at the things that annoy you the most in the other, and then — if you’re feeling very brave and have a cold margarita nearby just in case — turn the mirror around. See if you’ve got a little bit of that yourself.

Yikes.

This is not for the faint-hearted, my friends. The work is to take responsibility for our own shadow and quit projecting it on others and getting all wrought up about it.  This is tough tough work.  A lifetime of work.  And it takes a huge amount of humility and grace to get through. I can recommend books that are amazing in opening this world of the psyche up and that explain it all far more eloquently than I just have. But it’s important, I think, to add this to this discussion and to this blog.

We’re all in this together. We’re all human. We are all women who share many of the same characteristics — both good and bad. Let’s all shoulder our share of the responsibility for the bad, and celebrate the good that also exists.

We are, collectively, engaged in the most important job on the planet: creating the future in the shape of our children.  The history of how we got to where we are doesn’t matter.  The past cannot be allowed to unconsciously script the future. The fact that we look upon the step-mothers of the world like they’ve caught a disease is shameful for all of us.  Let’s take responsibility, keeping that margarita handy, and see what we can do to change that.

I’ll be at BlogHer this coming weekend.

If you’re going and would like to meet up, email me at jilldoughtie@gmail.com.

If it helps for folks planning to be there in person, here’s what I look like…

…when I’m wearing a helmet. But I won’t have a bike helmet on. I’m mostly posting this because it’s got a picture of my shoulder bag. It might be easy to recognize me by it.

And here’s what I look like…

…when my hair is longer than it is now and I’m laughing. Now my hair is a little above shoulder length.

And here’s what I look like…

…when I’m being silly with Kathy (who, alas, will not be there this year, so I will most likely be a little more serious than this).

I also look quite a lot like the picture of me in the blog header, minus the flowers.

Tags: BlogHer08, stepmoms

The three day rule was Kathy’s idea. If something happens that upsets one of us or that we’re mad or hurt about, we have to talk about it with the other one within three days. If we can’t bring ourselves to do that, we have to let it go. It’s no longer “mad-able”. It can’t be a secret, lurking grudge that we don’t talk about or that only comes up weeks or months or years later in a fight. It’s a statute of limitation on offenses.

She suggested it when we first started talking again after our year of angry silence, and it works for us. For me, it’s permission to speak up and to speak my mind. And it’s an impetus. It’s a “now or never” kind of deadline that more often than not gets me talking. For her, it’s the freedom to know that I’m not harboring grudges that she doesn’t have any inkling about. For both of us, it’s a kind of security in this odd, close quarters set-up. We agree to listen, even if it hurts. We agree to speak, even if it’s scary, to the point of stomach acid and shaking and getting the runs. And we agree to let some things go.

• A Stepmom’s Say: About Mommy – “Nothing has brought me more angry comments and viciousness, than the fact that I let the reader know that my stepsons call me “Mom.” I totally understand the passion behind these comments, but often disagree with the reasoning.” (more)
• Typical Momma: To Be Or Not To Be Mom – “If Mom is actively involved in your community and actively involved in the children’s lives; don’t introduce yourself as the children’s mother. Allow the community and the children to be proud of the fact that you are their stepmother and you care. This impact will be greater than you realize. The sooner we dispell the concept that stepparents aren’t involved parental role models… the better off we will be. It is OKAY to be the stepmom.” (more)
• Cool Mom: Step Mommies (video) – Cool Mom talks to her mom, a former teacher, about the positive role she often saw stepmoms playing in the families she interacted with.
• Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication (video) – De-escalating conflict through listening for what people are feeling and needing instead of for what they think about us.

• Breed ‘Em And Weep: Having it made and unmade – “This is what one gives up, succumbing to divorce, releasing into the wild a love you once were sure you had made.” (link)
• Paul Graham: Lies We Tell Kids – “Adults lie constantly to kids. I’m not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.” (link)
• J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination – “Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun… So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me… I was set free…” (link)

Check out TechCrunch’s review of When Is Good, a free online tool that helps groups of people choose meeting times by letting them all highlight the dates and times that work for each of them.

This looks like it could be handy for scheduling all kinds of co-parenting things from phone calls to doctors’ appointments to vacation schedules. The neat thing about it is that it just shows you a grid of all the invitees’ availablity — invitees can add short comments when they are clicking on their available times, but you don’t have to send out, sort through and distill a bunch of emails (or make a bunch of phone calls) to find a time that works for everyone. We haven’t used it yet across houses, but I’m bookmarking it because it looks pretty neat.

Tags: meetings, scheduling, stepfamilies

Kathy, in between acts of one of the kids’ plays.

By Jill Davis Doughtie

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.

By Katherine Shirek Doughtie

I was selling my book at the LA Times Festival of Books today, when I heard a woman’s voice say “Don’t I know you?” After about five minutes of cross-referencing, we figured out that we had shared a cabin at a church camp about 12 years ago, had had Thanksgiving together at my old house once, and had sworn never to lose touch. Which of course we had.

In the last twelve years or so, she has triumphed over two bouts of cancer and raised a spectacularly talented and beautiful Juilliard-bound daughter (who came by the booth and graciously asserted that she remembered me.)

In the last twelve years or so, I have disbanded my marriage, written a book, watched my own children grow up in an equally spectacular manner, and have done all the rest of the things one does when one is living life fully.

What was interesting about meeting up with her was that she was one of the first people I’ve talked to in years who didn’t know about the divorce. When I told her about it, she gasped and expressed concern and sadness. I felt instantly sorry that I had mentioned it so casually, but then realized how very far away from the whole “tragedy” aspect of it I have moved.

I hastened to assure her that it was all fine. I pitched her the book (of course), saying the long version of the story was in there. Then I told her about Jill and about this blog. I told her I had just started a really promising new relationship with a guy I’m crazy about. And I told her about my blossoming friendship with the mother of my new guy’s son. Even though I’m not nearly yet in the role of step mom, I now have a biological mom in my own life to be grateful for and to get to know.

In my fantasies I see my fella, his ex, their son, and the five of us Doughties all eating together at Thanksgiving, pouring wine for each other and embarrassing the boys with revealing family histories. Whether that cinemascope version of the extended family actually comes to pass or not, the fact remains that this has turned into a big rollicking happy fun family.

As I listened to my words I realized that I was being absolutely and completely sincere, almost like I was proselytizing divorce. I couldn’t imagine, actually, being happier in any way (well, in any way that still includes having a work a day job). I felt incredibly guilty as well, especially when she mentioned that she had raised her daughter all by herself. And here I was with all these extra adults supporting and advocating my kids!

Now… as the child of parents who were married eight times between the two of them, I have no difficulty remembering that divorce is always a wrenching, uncomfortable, psychologically disturbing event. In no way do I want to present it as anything other than a difficult and painful transition.

And yet… it can be alchemized. You can take all the messiness and ugliness and, with compassion and mindfulness and LOTS of luck, and move it into something else. It takes time — there is no substitution for the passage of time. And it takes a huge quantity of humor. And I cannot emphasize the consciousness part of it enough.

But I believe it can be done. And it should be done. Because otherwise we’ve capitulated to the dark side and the ugly side and agreed that that’s how life is and always will remain. And what a drag that would be.

By Jill Davis Doughtie

It was Tuesday. Jack’s class was leaving for Wyoming the following Sunday. We got an email from the trip organizers reminding us that it would be about fifteen degrees there and re-sending us the list of things he should bring with him: a warm winter coat, wool sweaters, a waterproof jacket, long underwear, and rain pants, among other things. The weather here is always pretty nice. We don’t tend to have wool sweaters and winter coats and rain pants in our closets, and especially not in kid sizes, since they — the kids — grow so much. I was gearing up for an expensive trip to REI, when I got a call from Kathy. Since we use a single email address for school stuff, the email had come to her at the same time. She had a bunch of cold weather gear from a couple of trips she’d taken the kids on a few years ago. Some of the things she got for Chris then might fit Jack now. We made plans to get together with Jack at her place and try it all on him before the weekend.

Wednesday, a friend lent Kathy a barely used boy’s snow jacket. She came by to pick up Jack after school, and before they left he tried it on. It was a little big, but not too big. It was just fine.

Thursday night, Jack and I drove over to Kathy’s to drop him off after school and to go through Kathy’s stash. Chris and a friend were hanging out in the street. I honked at them as I drove up. Kathy was talking on the phone about a project. Chris and his buddy came in the house and got put to work unloading the dishwasher. Sam the dog ran around between everyone. Kathy got off the phone, and within twenty minutes Jack had tried on all manner of warm and waterproof things and he had all the snow pants, long underwear, hats, gloves, rain pants and other warm things on the list. All we needed at the end of it was a few more heavy socks. No painful trips to REI had to be made. In the bustle of Sam touching base with everyone and Chris and his buddy in the kitchen and Jack putting on and taking off all kinds heavy things, I felt happy. This felt good.

Kathy packed all the warm gear into a couple of bags for me, and as I was walking out the door, Sam nosed out with me and escaped. Kathy went back inside to get the kids to help to catch him, and I walked over to the car to load up the gear. I caught a glimpse of him and then studiously ignored him. He came over to investigate. I dropped my bags and grabbed his collar before he could register what was happening, and handed him back over to Kathy and the boys as they were coming out. I’m not the wiliest dog wrangler in town, but I felt pretty proud of myself as I handed him back to Kathy. I was learning. We were learning. We were in this together.

Sunday, G and Chris and I drove to the airport to drop Jack off with his class. Kathy was coming, too, to say goodbye. She gave me a call after she’d parked. “I’m here. Where are you guys?” she asked, just as I saw her walk through the sliding glass doors.

“I see you. You’re in the right place,” I told her. And she was. And we were.