The emotional labor of stepparenting
The other day I read that a full day of emotional labor has the same impact on us as a full day of physical labor. Boy does THAT explain some shit. I remember on transition days, after my stepdaughter would head back to her mom's, I'd collapse on the couch, as numb and wrecked as if I'd spent the entire week working overtime.
When my day job involved 11 hours of dragging around heavy buckets, climbing scaffolds, and painting ceilings, you wouldn't think getting ignored by a 10-year-old for a week would be harder.
And yet, it soooo was.
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The definition of emotional labor
Wikipedia's page on emotional labor reads like one long metaphor for stepparenting:
Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors. This includes analysis and decision making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed.
These days though, the phrase "emotional labor" is used more often to describe imbalance in relationships – the long, slow resentment buildup of "Shit Someone Does That Goes Unrecognized," as Khe Hy describes it.
Why is stepparenting so hard??
Somehow we stepparents – superheroes that we are! – manage to encompass both of these definitions of emotional labor.
We're expected to regulate our emotions, arrange them in pretty little rows so they don't upset anyone around us… while every other member of the stepfamily is granted carte blanche to act as toxic as they feel in any given moment.
We all know exactly how that imbalance plays out in the workplace. We've all had those jobs with that sucky boss or that toxic co-worker or those customers who are the absolute worst. We all know how completely over it we feel by the end of the day. How thankful we are to come home, yank off our work clothes and kick them into whichever corner of the room is furthest away from us, then take a screaming hot shower to scrub away those long, draining hours.
As stepparents, though, we don't get an end of the day. The relief we'd feel when it's time to go home from a shitty job doesn't exist for us because home itself has become a B horror flick: the stress is coming from inside the house.😱
And then we also have this unique/cursed perspective of seeing our stepfamily's stress fractures as clearly as if we were handed X-ray vision along with our official stepparenting handbook. We see our stepkids acting up, so we step in to smooth out existing parenting gaps and prevent a meltdown. We see conflict between our partners and their ex, so we step in to smooth out communication between houses and prevent WWIII.
We take it upon ourselves to do all kinds of Shit That Goes Unrecognized, because we are the only ones who seem to realize that otherwise our family will not survive. We are Cassandra: cursed with the ability to foretell the future and never have anyone believe us. No matter how much we tell our partners exactly what shitstorm is about to hit and how they could prevent it, they never listen.
So we tell them louder the next time. We work harder. We take more responsibility on ourselves, hoping to save them. Hoping to protect our families as best we can from all the potential pitfalls that only we can see.
And the weight of this knowledge is so goddamn heavy.
We keep failing, because no one will listen. We keep trying, because that's what family does. And we keep pushing down our disappointment, our frustration, our exhaustion, because we're still expected to smile pretty and play nice like we're serving cocktails instead of living on our very last nerve.
When do we get to rest? Can't we ever let down our guard? Where's our screaming hot shower to scrub the stupid off at the end of a super hard stepparenting day?
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How to be a great stepparent
When trying to figure out how I could become a better stepmom, I used to think the answer was to stepparent better. Do more. Try harder. Because by doing more and trying harder, I would finally win SD (and her mother) over and then we'd reach a lovely, stupidity-free oasis.
Turns out the opposite was true, and my best intentions made everything worse.
Instead of trying to crush the stepmom role, I should've just been myself. Instead of doing more, I should've stepped back and taken the pressure off. Instead of trying harder, I should've let things happen naturally. And instead of thinking our family needed calm, controlled conditions in which to grow, I wish I could've recognized that we were one of those badass plants that needs fire to bust its seeds wide open.
I've been doing a lot of Yoga with Adriene lately and one thing she always says is "Find what feels good." Find what feels right for your body instead of contorting yourself into whatever pose just because that’s what the instructor is demonstrating. Do what works for you, find that balance between your limitations and your needs. The point isn’t perfection; the point is to get the benefit of the pose.
Similarly, we need to find what feels good as stepparents. We need to define our role in a way that feels good to us, outside the expectations everyone else has for our role. And even outside the expectations we hold for ourselves. We need to labor less, and trust the process more: we are not the glue holding our stepfamily together. We’re individuals with our own needs, and we need to remember that.
The friction between your partner and their ex, the parenting problems between your partner and their kids— those problems existed way before we showed up; they’re not ours to fix. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.
So maybe today’s a good day to set down those mountains that are not yours to carry.
