Chapter One

"You can't be a peer. You can't be a parent. It took me five years to figure it out."

"I was in our house looking out the window, watching the kids with my husband and his parents playing together on the lawn, and I thought: I don't like these people. I don't belong. My life rotated around them, always what was best for the children. How can you argue against that moral argument? But I resented it a lot."

As a stepmother, you are initially perceived, falsely or not, as a rival to the most traditionally revered and respected biological force in the family — the mother. If that's not enough to put some drama into your life, there's plenty more.

You are the last member to enter an extended family (the term most commonly used to describe these modern hybrids in which the natural parents are divorced and one or both are remarried), and you are often the last to grasp the significance of that. Family life is already in progress. You join it when you marry, at a time of high hopes, optimism, and a romantic view of family members, together with your commitment to them. Everyone else (your husband, his children, and their mother) is a bit more realistic. They know more about each other's strengths and weaknesses, moves and limits. The stepmother is an earnest newcomer — and not always a welcome one.

"Dad's new wife" has never ranked high on the roster of family endearments. No one has known exactly what to make of her, and she often shares their puzzlement. The trouble, as one psychologist points out, is that modern stepmothers typically lack the purpose they had in times past when a father was likely