Brenda Ockum, the founder of StepMom magazine (www.StepMomMagazine.com) is going to appear on Good Morning America this Friday, April 3 at 8 a.m. EST. She'll be talking about the magazine, her own experiences, and presumably how to survive and thrive as a woman with stepkids. Check her out on your local ABC affiliate this Friday at 8 a.m.
Here she goes again, this time on the cover of today's New York Post as it hawks her Vanity Fair cover and cover story . She may be a Victoria's Secret undewear model, but she's also a dreadful cliche when she preens, of her toddler stepson, "he's 100% mine" and "I already feel like he's my son, from the first day." While also claiming, in the same interview, "I respect that he has a mother."
I already said I'm not apologizing for my love of Star magazine. Ok? It has been a valuable research tool, allowing me to keep up with what is supposedly going on between Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and Bruce Willis all these last years. And to thereby track our national obsession with what I will call the Overly Cozy Divorce.
I make no bones about and offer no apologies for my obsession with my weekly fix, Star magazine. My fellow readers may have been drawn by the March 30th edition's headline that screamed about John Mayer's alleged intention to publish a tell-all about his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Anniston. Whatever. For me, the reading got worthwhile on page 62, with what I think of as a kind of round-up of round-ups: "Step Stars," about all the "celebrities who treat their partners' kids as if they were their own." Indeed, the copy proclaims, "They're not bio-babies, but these celebs treat their partners' kids like their very own flesh and blood." Followed by pages of photos and quotes attributed to steps like Jenny McCarthy, Katie Holmes, Megan Fox, and Sandra Bullock essentially gushing, "I love them just like they're my own" over and over.
You knew Catherine Zeta-Jones was an Oscar-winning actress. But what about her side job — carpenter? Or, more specifically, the side job of women with stepchildren the world over: family carpenter. At first glance, a recent story about Catherine and her stepson in the Daily Mail is heart-warming: Catherine helped bring Michael and his wild-child, hard-partying young adult son Cameron back together after years of estrangement, telling him "You are a huge part of this family and you are always welcome" (see the full story as it ran in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/femail/article-1151830/Catherine-Zeta-Jones-hot-girl-Zorro-brought-father-says-Cameron-Douglas.html). He's grateful for it, and it's nice to hear a new riff on the old narrative in which stepmothers are wicked excluders, surely.
I can't even remember his name. It's true that I'm not much of a sports fan, but he seems like the least important player in the game I care about. It's the women — one married to him, the other the mother of his child — that have me (and perhaps you) interested.