Fitting A Family Together

Lisa Edelstein has two children, but she’s not their mom. The actress (star of Girlfriends’ Guide To Divorce) is a stepmother – and she’s learnt a few things about how to belong in a family you didn’t start.

MADRASTRA. Try to say that word out loud. Go to a mirror, if at all possible, and watch what happens to your face when you say it.

You sneer. You can’t help it. 

Madrastra is the Spanish word for ‘stepmother’, and I hear a sneer built right into it. Same with the Hebrew term, em horeget. And the German, Stiefmutter. For argument’s sake, I find that the Russian word, pronounced machekha, is kind of pretty, but I can’t exactly introduce myself as my kids’ machekha.

I tried to Google ‘Why do stepmothers have such a bad rap?’ but by the time I’d typed ‘Why do stepm-’, Google excitedly anticipated my needs, showing me ‘Why do stepmothers hate stepchildren?’ Why? WHY?

Is it so impossible to imagine loving a child you didn’t give birth to? Sure, raising human beings is hard even when you’ve had the opportunity for oxytocin to kick in for some chemical bonding. But as any adoptive parent will tell you, love comes anyway, even if you became a parent without having sex to get there or you became a parent by default. Like me.

A professional would probably say that when we met, my husband and I did everything wrong. First of all, he was less than two months out of his first marriage. Red-flag alert! Not surprisingly, he was a mess (red flag), his ex was in an equal state (red flag) and the kids were completely confused (red flag, red flag, red flag). Not one advice column would have read: Go for it! But I knew, and he knew, that underneath all that chaos we were two really well-matched people.