Am I a bad person for being very wary of my five-year-old stepdaughter? I had resolved to not have children of my own but when I met my partner, with whom I have a wonderful relationship, he came with two children from a previous marriage. He’s very supportive and understanding in giving me my space from the children when I need it, and he’s come to respect the fact I am making concessions in my life to take on parenting.
I love both the children but the youngest is a challenge. She presents a lot of the characteristics of her mother – she has no shame, no accountability, zero fear of authority and is incredibly spoilt. My partner struggles with this too. I know she’s five and you can’t expect someone so young to be accountable, but I’m really worried she won’t grow out of it.
I don’t want to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which she senses me distancing myself and that rejection makes matters worse, but at the same time I am feeling resentful. I’m resistant to tolerating her when I never asked for her to be in my life in the first place. Is it wrong to be wary of such a small child?
Eleanor says: Am I a bad person for feeling this way, that’s the question? Is there a world where I say, “yes”? Of course not.
Here’s your permission: it’s fine to feel mixed. It’s fine to have not wanted kids. It’s fine to feel complicated about their presence in your life now, or complicated about their mother. It’s fine to feel frustrated by a particular child’s behaviour. It’s fine to resent the way stepmothers can get a raw deal, culturally – easily villainised, expected to handle the same challenges as biological parents, without the same decision-privileges. All this is fine to struggle with.
What might not be fine is what we choose to do, given those feelings.
You said you’re resistant to tolerating your stepdaughter when you never asked for her to be in your life in the first place. True, you didn’t ask. But you were asked, and you said yes. You don’t have to have a relationship with someone who has kids. You don’t have to say yes to having a kid in your house, your time, your life.
To be totally clear: having said yes does not mean you can’t feel resentful sometimes. It doesn’t even mean you have to keep saying yes. Heaven knows we all agree to things we’re not thrilled with for the sake of our relationship: moving country, changing jobs, caring for their relatives. But it gets sticky if, once the bad bits show up, we reserve the right to be treated as someone who didn’t sign up for this.
Some decisions don’t work like that. Especially with little kids. Your concern about this is totally right; you can really mess up a kid if ambivalence about your decision to be in their life becomes ambivalence in how you treat them. It’s fine to not want a certain relationship with a child. What’s not fine is agreeing to a relationship you don’t really want, and then letting the child see that asterisk. That’s true for biological parents, step-parents, foster parents.
So perhaps instead of asking whether you’re a bad person for having these feelings, you could ask what you’ll say “yes” to from here on.
Some step-parents want to be a parent, no modifications. Others want to be more clearly delineated as a parent’s partner. Counselling with her father would be a really good investment to make sure you both agree about which version of step-parenting you’re trying to build.
If you do decide to continue to be part of his life, he is a package deal. So then, the goal becomes how to process and move past these feelings, not to privately stand by their legitimacy. It might help to learn about psychology and development in five-year-olds. That may help you understand difficult behaviour, and how it may come from difficulties she’s experiencing. Counselling for you, privately, could also remind everyone involved that your role is a hard one; that you deserve time and help to figure it out.
It is OK to find this incredibly frustrating. But you want to be careful about saying yes to a certain version of life while still maintaining the backstop that it is not the life you wanted.