The evil stepmother is so integral to our familiar telling of “Snow White” that I was surprised to discover that an earlier version of the story doesn’t feature a stepmother at all. In this version, Snow White has no dead mother, only a living mother who wants her dead. This was a pattern of revision for the Brothers Grimm; they transformed several mothers into stepmothers between the first version of their collected stories, published in 1812, and the final version, published in 1857. The figure of the stepmother effectively became a vessel for the emotional aspects of motherhood that were too ugly to attribute to mothers directly (ambivalence, jealousy, resentment) and those parts of a child’s experience of her mother (as cruel, aggressive, withholding) that were too difficult to situate directly in the biological parent-child dynamic. The figure of the stepmother—lean, angular, harsh—was like snake venom drawn from an unacknowledged wound, siphoned out in order to preserve the healthy body of a maternal ideal.

  “It is not only a means of preserving an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good,” Bettelheim argues, “but it also permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother, who is viewed as a different person.” The psychologist D. W. Winnicott puts it more simply: “If there are two mothers, a real one who has died, and a stepmother, do you see how easily a child gets relief from tension by having one perfect and the other horrid?” In other words, the shadow figure of the fairy-tale stepmother is a predatory archetype reflecting something true of every mother: the complexity of her feelings toward her child, and her child’s feelings toward her.

  Even if Lily didn’t split her ideas of motherhood into perfect absence and wicked presence, I did—assigning precisely that psychic division of labor. I imagined that her biological mother would have offered everything I couldn’t always manage: patience, pleasure, compassion. She would have been with Lily in her tantrums, as we’d once been advised—a bit opaquely—by a therapist. Her real mother wouldn’t have bribed her with ridiculous amounts of plastic. She wouldn’t have gotten so frustrated when bedtime lasted an hour and a half, or else her frustration would have had the counterweight of an unconditional love I was still seeking. I knew these self-flagellations were ridiculous—even “real” parents weren’t perfect—but they offered a certain easy groove of self-deprecation. A woman mothering another woman’s child, Winnicott observes, “may easily find herself forced by her own imagination into the position of witch rather than of fairy godmother.”

  In a study called “The Poisoned Apple,” the psychologist (and stepmother) Elizabeth Church analyzed her interviews with 104 stepmothers through the lens of one particular question: How do these women reckon with the evil archetype they stepped into? “Although their experience was the opposite of the fairy-tale stepmothers,” she reported, insofar as “they felt powerless in the very situation where the fairy-tale stepmothers exerted enormous power,” they still “tended to identify with the image of the wicked stepmother.” She called it their poisoned apple. They felt “wicked” for experiencing feelings of resentment or jealousy, and this fear of their own “wickedness” prompted them to keep these feelings to themselves, which only made them feel more shame for having these feelings in the first place.

  Folktales often deploy the stepmother as a token mascot of the dark maternal—a woman rebelling against traditional cultural scripts—but the particular history of the American stepmother is more complicated. As the historian Leslie Lindenauer argues in I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750–1960, the figure of the American stepmother found her origins in the American witch. Lindenauer posits that the eighteenth-century popular imagination took the same terrible attributes that the Puritans had ascribed to witches—malice, selfishness, coldness, absence of maternal impulse—and started assigning them to stepmothers instead. “Both were examples of women who, against God and nature, perverted the most essential qualities of the virtuous mother,” Lindenauer observes. “Moreover, witches and stepmothers alike were most often accused of harming other women’s children.”

  The stepmother became a kind of scapegoat, a new repository for aspects of femininity that had been threatening for a long time: female agency, female creativity, female restlessness, maternal ambivalence. By the late eighteenth century the stepmother was a stock villain, familiar enough to appear in grammar books. One boy was even injured by his dead stepmother from beyond the grave when a column above her tombstone fell on his head. The particular villainy of the stepmother—the duplicity of tyranny disguised as care—enabled colonial rhetoric that compared England’s rule to “a stepmother’s severity,” as one 1774 tract put it. In an article that ran in Ladies’ Magazine in 1773, on the eve of the American Revolution, a stepdaughter laments her fate at the hands of her stepmother: “Instead of the tender maternal affection…what do I now see but discontent, ill-nature, and mal-a-pert authority?” The stepmother offers bondage cunningly packaged as devotion.

  But the American popular imagination hasn’t always understood the stepmother as a wicked woman. If it was true that she was an eighteenth-century gold digger—a latter-day witch—then it was also true that she was a mid-nineteenth-century saint, happily prostrate to the surge of her own innate maternal impulse. In the Progressive Era, she was proof that being a good mother was less about saintly instincts and more about reason, observation, and rational self-improvement. You didn’t have to have a biological connection—or even an innate caregiving impulse—you just had to apply yourself.

  When I interviewed Lindenauer about her research, she told me that she had been surprised to discover these vacillations—particularly surprised to find the figure of the virtuous stepmother showing up in the very same women’s magazines that had vilified her a few decades earlier. She eventually started to detect a pattern. It seemed as if the stepmother found redemption whenever the nuclear family was under siege: in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, or when divorce emerged as a social phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The stepmother became a kind of “port in the storm,” Lindenauer told me. “It’s better to have a stepmother than no mother at all.”

  The golden era of the American stepmother archetype—the summit of her virtue—was the second half of the nineteenth century, during and after the Civil War, when sentimental novels and women’s magazines were full of saintly stepmothers eager to care for the motherless children who stumbled into their laps. In Charlotte Yonge’s 1862 novel, The Young Step-Mother; or, A Chronicle of Mistakes, the protagonist, Albinia, is portrayed as a woman with a surplus of goodwill, just waiting for people with needs (read: grief) deep enough to demand the deployment of her excess goodness. Her siblings worry about Albinia marrying a widower with children, afraid she will become a kind of indentured servant, but the novel reassures us that “her energetic spirit and love of children animated her to embrace joyfully the cares which such a choice must impose on her.” When her new husband brings her home, he apologizes for what he is asking from her. “As I look at you, and the home to which I have brought you, I feel that I have acted selfishly,” he says. But she won’t let him apologize. “Work was always what I wished,” she replies, “if only I could do anything to lighten your grief and care.” With the children, Albinia doesn’t simply say but truly feels all the right things: she is sorry they have her in place of their mother; they can call her Mother, but they don’t have to. Although the novel is subtitled “A Chronicle of Mistakes,” Albinia doesn’t seem to make many.

  When I read in the novel’s epigraph, “Fail—yet rejoice,” it felt like a lie and an impossible imperative at once. In fact, the entire voice of the saintly stepmother felt like an elaborate humblebrag. She knew she would always be second—or third! or fifth! or tenth!—but she didn’t care. Not one bit. She just wanted to be useful. I thought I would be glad to discover the existence of these virtuous stepmothers, but instead I found them nearly impossible to accept—much harder to stomach than the wicked stepmothers in fairy tales. My poisoned apple wasn’t the wicked stepmother but her archetypal opposite, the saint, whose innate virtue felt like the harshest possible mirror. It would always show me someone more selfless than I was. These stories forgot everything that was structurally difficult about this kind of bond, or else they insisted that virtue would overcome all. This is why fairy tales are more forgiving than sentimental novels. They let darkness into the frame. Finding darkness in another story is so much less lonely than fearing the darkness is yours alone.

  I punished myself when I lost patience, when I bribed, when I wanted to flee. I punished myself for resenting Lily when she came into our bed, night after night, which wasn’t actually a bed but a futon we pulled out in the living room. Every feeling I had, I wondered: Would a real mother feel this? It wasn’t the certainty that she wouldn’t that was painful, but the uncertainty itself: How could I know?

  Initially I imagined that I might feel most like an “actual” mother among strangers, who had no reason to believe I wasn’t one. But it was usually among strangers that I felt most like a fraud. One day early in our relationship, Lily and I went to a Mister Softee, one of the ice-cream trucks parked like land mines all over New York City. I asked Lily what she wanted and she pointed to the double cone of soft serve, the biggest one, covered in rainbow sprinkles. I said, “Great!” I was still at the Disney Store, still thrilled to find the sled set, still ready to pass as mother by whatever means necessary, whatever reindeer necessary, whatever soft serve necessary.

  The double cone was so huge that Lily could barely hold it. Two hands, I would have known to say a few months later, but I didn’t know to say it then. I overheard the woman behind me in line ask her friend, “What kind of parent gets her child that much ice cream?” My face went hot with shame. This parent. Which is to say: not a parent at all. I was afraid to turn around and at the same time I desperately wanted to turn around, to make the stranger feel ashamed, to speak back to the maternal superego she represented by saying: “What kind of mother? A mother trying to replace a dead one.” Instead I grabbed a wad of napkins and offered to carry Lily’s cone back to our table so she wouldn’t drop it on the way.

  As a stepparent, I often felt like an impostor—or else I felt the particular loneliness of dwelling outside the bounds of the most familiar story line. I hadn’t been pregnant, given birth, felt my body surge with the hormones of attachment. I woke up every morning to a daughter who called me Mommy but also missed her mother. One of Lily’s favorite dolls—a goth character called Spectra Vondergeist, with purple-streaked hair and a skeleton-key belt—was advertised on her cardboard packaging as the “Daughter of a Ghost.”

  I often called our situation “singular.” But as with so many kinds of singularity, it was not only a double-edged blade—a source of loneliness and pride at once—but also a delusion. “Lots of people are stepparents,” my mother told me once, and of course she was right. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that four in ten Americans say they have at least one step-relationship. Twelve percent of women are stepmothers. I can guarantee you that almost all these women sometimes feel like frauds or failures.

  In an essay about stepparents, Winnicott argues for the value of “unsuccess stories.” He even imagines the benefits of gathering a group of “unsuccessful stepparents” in a room together. “I think such a meeting might be fruitful,” he writes. “It would be composed of ordinary men and women.” When I read that passage, it stopped me dead with longing. I wanted to be in that meeting, sitting with those ordinary men and women—hearing about their ice-cream bribes, their everyday impatience, their frustration and fraudulence, their desperate sleds.

  In the methodology portion of her “Poisoned Apple” study, Elizabeth Church admits that she disclosed to her subjects that she was also a stepmother before interviewing them. After an interview was finished, she sometimes described her own experiences. Many of her subjects confessed that they had told her things during their interviews that they had never told anyone else. I could understand that—that they somehow would feel, by virtue of being in the presence of another stepmother, as if they had been granted permission to speak. It was something like the imagined gathering of unsuccessful stepparents, as if they were at an AA meeting in a church basement, taking earned solace in the minor triumphs and frequent failures of their kind: not blood, but a kind of kin.

  The decision to call the stepmother Mother, or the decision not to call her Mother, is often a dramatic hinge in stories about stepmothers. It usually functions as a climactic moment of acceptance or refusal. In a story called “My Step-Mother,” published in the Decatur Republican in 1870, a young girl regards her new stepmother with skepticism. When her stepmother asks her to play a song on the piano, trying to earn her trust and affection, the girl decides to play “I Sit and Weep by My Mother’s Grave.” But lo! The stepmother is undeterred. She not only compliments the girl on her moving performance, she shares that she also lost her mother when she was young and also used to love that song. The story ends on a triumphant note, with the daughter finally calling her Mother, an inverted christening—child naming the parent—that inaugurates the “most perfect confidence” that grows between them.

  For Lily, calling me Mother wasn’t the end of anything. The day after Charles and I married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, Lily asked almost immediately if she could call me Mommy. It was clear she had been waiting to ask, and I was moved by her desire—as if we had landed in the closing credits of a movie, the soundtrack reaching a crescendo all around us.

  But we weren’t in the credits. We were just getting started. I was terrified. What would happen next? What happened next: pulling into a 7-Eleven for snacks as Lily tugged on my sleeve to tell me she’d had an “adult drink” at the laser-tag birthday party she’d just attended and now she felt funny. She didn’t want me to tell her dad. It was like the universe had sent its first maternal test. Was she drunk? What should I do? If I was going to let myself be called Mommy, I had to be prepared to deal with the fallout from the laser-tag birthday party. Charles eventually deduced that she had had a few sips of iced tea.

  It felt less as if I had “earned” the title of mother—the way it has figured in so many sentimental stories, as a reward for behaving the right way and defying the old archetypes—and more as if I’d stepped into a cutout doll already sculpted for me by a little girl’s yearning. It was as if I’d landed in the 1900 story called “Making Mamma,” in which six-year-old Samantha layers a dressmaker’s dummy with old fabric in order to make a surrogate mother for herself. It was as if Lily had bestowed a deep and immediate trust in me—unearned, born of need—and now I had to figure out how to live inside that trust without betraying it.

  Once I stepped into the costume of a well-worn cultural archetype, I got used to hearing other people’s theories about my life. Everyone had ideas about our family without knowing anything about our family. One woman said our situation was easier than it would have been if I’d had a terrible ex to compete with; another woman said I would be competing with the memory of Lily’s perfect biological mother forever. When I wrote an article about a family trip for a travel magazine, the editor wanted a bit more pathos from my account: “Has it been bumpy?” she wrote in the margins of my draft. “What are you hoping for from this trip? A tighter family bond? A chance to let go of the sadness? Or…?? Tug at our heartstrings a bit.” When this editor imagined our family, she envisioned us saturated by sadness, or else contoured by resistance. More than anything, I liked her “Or…??” It rang true. It wasn’t that every theory about our family offered by other people felt wrong; it was more that most of them felt right, or at least held a grain of truth that resonated. Which felt even more alarming, somehow, to be so knowable to strangers.

  But every theory also felt incomplete. There was so much more truth around it, or else something close to its opposite felt true as well. I rarely felt like saying, “No, it’s nothing like that.” I usually wanted to say: “Yes, it is like that. And also like this, and like this, and like this.” Sometimes the sheer fact of those assumptions—the way they churned inside everyone we encountered—made stepmotherhood feel like loving someone in front of an operating theater full of strangers. I was convinced that I was constantly being dissected for how fully or compassionately I had assumed my maternal role.

  Ultimately I found only two fairy tales with good stepmothers, and they were both from Iceland. In one, a woman named Himinbjorg guides her stepson through his mourning by helping him fulfill a prophecy delivered to him by his dead mother in a dream: that he will free a princess from the spell that turned her into an ogre. By the time the prince returns from his mission, victorious, the royal court is ready to burn Himinbjorg at the stake, because everyone is convinced that she is responsible for his disappearance. Her selflessness moved me. She is willing to look terrible in order to help her stepson pursue a necessary freedom, while I worried that I cared too much about proving I was a good stepmother—worried that wanting to seem like a good stepmother might get in the way of being a good stepmother. Perhaps I wanted credit for mothering more than I wanted to mother. Himinbjorg, on the other hand, is willing to look like a witch just to help her stepson break the spell he needs to break.

  Then there was Hildur. Her husband had vowed never to marry after the death of his first queen, because he feared his daughter would be mistreated. “All stepmothers are evil,” he tells his brother, “and I don’t wish to harm Ingibjorg.” He is a fairy-tale king who has already absorbed the wisdom of fairy tales. He knows the deal with stepmoms. But he falls in love with Hildur anyway. She says she won’t marry him, though—not unless he lets her live alone with his daughter for three years before the wedding. Their marriage is made possible by her willingness to invest in a relationship with his daughter that exists apart from him, as its own fierce flame.

 

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