For (blank)moms on Mother’s Day
Being a stepmother can be really fucking hard, and it can be especially hard on Mother’s Day. I used to plan to have at least a few drinks on mother’s day to deal with the day, which is brutal for a lot of us for all sorts of different reasons.
 A stepmother is kind of like being a regular mother except with all the work and none of the reward. We are often the villains of fairy tales and sometimes called “stepmonsters”. However, many of us are the ones that make sure homework is done and vegetables are eaten. We may petition the other parent for leniency when a kid messes up, and plan family vacations that the kids look forward to. Nonetheless, on Mother’s day - for a lot of us - another person gets taken out to brunch and gets cards and other crafts made in school for “mom”. (Honestly, with all the different kinds of families out there and all the parent trauma and drama kids may have, I am shocked that they still celebrate these holidays in schools by having kids write poems to “mom” or crafts “for dad”, though that is a whole separate rant.) Â
 My issue is not necessarily with Mother’s Day itself, rather the continued insistence of our culture, even though there is tons of evidence to the contrary, that families are made up of one mother and one father who are the biological parents of kids. (I’m not even going to get into the whole binary gender notions of “mom” and “dad”) Most of the families I know are not like this whether because there are additions of chosen family, queer families, step people, no kids, biological parents who aren’t in the picture, etc.
 The stepmother role looks a lot different in different houses, and I think some of the difficulty of the role is magnified in my particular situation, which may make me particularly bitter. For example, some stepmoms see their stepkids every other weekend and are able to have less of a parent role, and more of a cool aunt role, because the kids already have a fit mother who takes care of them and does the maternal stuff so you don’t have to. Other situations, like mine, have my step kids living with me and their dad full time and their biological mother out of state and just in their lives enough to make promises she doesn’t follow through on.
 Mother’s Day was so painful for me for so long because even though I was the one doing all of the day-to-day mothering, I was still “Katie” and not “Mommy”. To be clear, it wasn’t about the kids and their appreciation of me, they love me very much and were as appreciative as kids can and should be. It was that there was this day that was so specific about the person it honored that there wasn’t room for the real life people who did mothering under names other than “mom”.
 Sadly, their biological mother faded from their lives more and more to the point that there are just infrequent phone calls now and broken promises to visit. I am now the one they celebrate on Mother’s day because unfortunately I am the only mother in their life. This is not a happy development, and not the way I wanted the day to feel less fraught. What I wanted is for the holiday to be more inclusive. So many people have complicated relationships with the maternal figures in their lives that it seems necessary to consciously broaden the holiday, not to mention those who have lost their mothers so that the holiday just adds more grief to already crushing amounts of grief.
 Parenting is hard and so much work. I want Mother’s Day to be an acknowledgement of this work no matter who is doing it. As a step-parent, it can be so hard to deal with the almost parent status sometimes. Before I had a baby people would ask me when I would have “my own” child. I would tell them that I already had “my own” children. They were the kids that I grocery shopped for, took care of when they were sick, and told to clean their rooms. Having a baby made this even more clear to me – they are just as much my kids as he is.
 I know that in many households, mine included, Mother’s Day does celebrate people other than just “mom”. However, I want the broader cultural messages to catch up to this. Sure, Hallmark has a (small) section of Mother’s Day cards for stepmothers, but what about aunties and babysitters and other people in the village it takes to raise a child? I have already said it a few times, but it can not be overstated: kids are so much work. They are exhausting! And on the one day that honors maternal caretakers, everyone who does the work should be recognized.
 Even now step-parenting is filled with so many small indignities that make it harder for me than parenting my biologically related child. Just the other day, after taking the kids to the doctor for years, the nurse all of a sudden insisted that my husband had to be called in order to approve vaccinations for them. Because of the fact that legally children can only have two parents, the only way I can get full parental rights is if the rights of their biological mother are terminated. Because her connection to them is tenuous, we wouldn’t want to do anything to encourage less involvement, if anything we want her more involved with them, but it can be a practical pain in the ass sometimes.
 I know that parenting and other relationships with kids are rewards in themselves, but that is not what this is about. (And people are always talking about the rewards, and don’t talk enough about the work, at least on Facebook.) I just want stepmothers and other (adjective) parents to know that I see them and the work they are doing and I wished that as a culture we appreciated the position that these other kinds of mothers occupied. Â
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