If you married or partnered with a guy with kids, then had a child with him, I would love to hear from you. I am writing a story about women in this situation for a national parenting magazine. I will protect your privacy by changing your name and identifying details. Please email me at wednesday@wednesdaymartin.com if you'd like to share your experience. Thanks!
In spite of the brief snow flurries in Manhattan today, Spring is in the air. I know this because I am woefully underprepared for both Passover and Easter (sometimes, being part of an interfaith marriage means bungling two traditions). If memory serves, they are to be followed in short order by May weddings and graduations, after which there will be the long Memorial Day holiday, followed by June weddings and graduations, and along the way, sometimes as early as late April or early May if they're in college, the kids are off for a three or four month summer holiday.
Did you catch Oprah yesterday? The theme was "Secrets of Motherhood," and women were cutting loose (http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow-20090311-secret-lives-moms). I laughed out loud at the story of a mom who was driving down the highway with all of her kids asleep in the backseat — bliss! A few moments, perhaps even an hour, of quiet to look forward to! But what to do about the fact that she was dying to pee? If she pulled over at a rest stop the crowd would wake up and make her life hell again, after all. So, like any self-respecting mom in desperate need of silence and a potty, she hauled a diaper out of the nearby diaper bag — and used it. You also have to give it up for the mom who said she thinks the secret of discipline is for your kids to think you're a little bit crazy and they just don't know what you might do next. Case in point: she threatened her daughter that if she continued to misbehave, Mom would get rid of ALL her toys. Her warning went unheeded — so she made good on her promise. Swooping into the room with a big garbage bag, she spirited every toy away, Grinch-style: "There wasn't so much as a Lego left." She left her kid high and dry for 24 hours, then returned the stash. But the lesson lives on: "All I have to do is get a certain crazy look in my eye," the woman reports, "and she knows I mean business."
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.
The February 20th murder of Kenzie Houk has been described as a horrifying, incomprehensible, and shocking tragedy. Understandably so. Houk was 26 years old, eight months pregnant, and lying asleep in bed at the time she was shot in the back of the head. How can it be, many wonder, that the accused killer is Jordan Brown—her fiance’s eleven-year-old son?