We stepped up to the mother of all roles and we're loving it!

With a third of families now blended, new celebrates Mother’s Day by sharing stories from women exploding the stereotypes about stepmums

Stepfamilies are now the fastest-growing family type in the UK. In fact, it’s estimated that one in three of all families are now what we’ve come to call blended families, according to Happy Steps, the research-based stepfamily resource centre.

Yet stepmothers still get labelled with those outdated stereotypes from films and fairy tales that portray them as wicked or outright evil.

So to celebrate Mother’s Day, we talked to three women with different experiences of step-parenting about the joys and the challenges they’ve experienced when a new partner has brought more than just romance into their lives…

I lived a heteronormative life until I was 30, when I came to a realisation about my sexuality. I started dating women and, five years ago, Sam and I matched on Tinder. It was chemistry from the get-go and I thought, “This is absolutely why they call it ‘the other half’ of a person.”

When Sam told me she had children, my initial reaction was, “That’s not ideal, but we’ll see how it plays out.” I was taking it quite slow in my head but I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous.