The Stepmom Chronicles: Fill Your Own Shoes

I'm going to let you in on a small secret.
Are you ready for this?
It's probably going to change your life.

Okay, here it is:

I'm...human. 


Whew, I'm so glad that's over with. 
Are you shocked right now?


OH, me neither. 

As many of you know, I'm a fairly new step-mother, only filling this role for a year now. 
I went from 0 to 100 in 1.6 seconds! Talk about a ride!

Each day I learn something new about our three very different boys.

Caler, Mr. Daddy Jr, whose favorite color is purple, who doesn't like anyone to touch his food but him, who is always the one to hug me the most and at the most random of times even when I'm sweaty from an afternoon run. 

Corban, the Minecraft King, the blonde-haired, long-eye-lashed sweet heart who loves pizza, playing ninjas and is the first to greet me at the door. 

Cannon...oh cannon, our bouncy, smiley, witty little thing who always seems to have a tooth missing somewhere yet never misses the punch line of one of my jokes. 

Just like I learn new things about our boys each day, I learn how to walk just a little more as their step mother than I did the day before. 

I am a very young step momma, making this transition with as much grace and wisdom as humanly possible.

When you step into your role as a step parent, you're walking on fresh baby legs. 
You're wobbly, your knees shake and sometimes you trip on that insistent snag in the carpet over and over again. 

Want to know something surprising?
I have never seen a parent scold their newborn baby for tripping up while learning to walk.
When they wobble, when they take those shaky first steps to their mother's open arms and face plant, slobbering all over their new rug, the mother doesn't furrow her brow and show her child disdain.

Why?
Because the mother knows she once had to learn to walk too.
She fell too.
No child enters the world knowing how to walk like an adult. 

As a step parent, you don't waltz into your new family unit knowing how it works, knowing how to play your "role," the role only you can define.

If you do dance into your stepchildren's lives trying to play biological parent, not easing into being a parent, resentment can flare. 

You are learning, step momma. That's okay. 
You are human. That's okay too.

You do not need to fill the mother's role or the father's role, you need to fill your role.

Each unit is different, so you alone must decide what that role should be to create a healthy environment for your step children.  

Fill your own shoes. 

Because guess what?
Nobody...NOBODY can fill those shoes better than you.
You don't have to play mom, dad, disciplinarian or any role that this particular play doesn't call you to fill.

They don't need another mom or dad, they need you and all of the unique qualities and special love you have to offer. 

They need you to love their daddy.
They need you to be an open ear.
They need you to hug them when they feel afraid.
They need you to support their parents in disciplines and structure. 

You are the support beams to this house. 
You lift up when you need to and you carry weight when you need to. 

No one can be their step momma better than you can. 

No one can learn to walk for you, you must learn on your own and on your own time. 



"I have set the LORD continually before me; Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken." -Psalm 16:8

The Little Blue Square

Let me start off by informing you all that I originally planned to totally deactivate my Facebook page.

Instead, I totally removed the app from my smart phone.

I have slowly been making changes in how I use social media (but first let me take a selfie), but this is the biggest.

The checking it, checking in, scrolling, constant need to see what was going on...enough was enough.

The app is removed. In order to check it, I will have to get my laptop out at home (where I rarely am) and log in.

I have hidden people from my sight due to negativity in general.

Such precious time had been wasted on useless scrolling and updating.

Why, you ask?
What's the harm?

I don't need to let the world know any time I eat a healthy salad, get a hair cut or go on a date night with my husband.

I don't need to update Facebook every time I catch up with an old friend over coffee.

I don't need to let anyone know what I wore today or how well my life is going.

I need to re-focus my intentions and re-evaluate who my true audience should be.

Instead of posting photos of my kids and talking about how much fun we are having together, I should be more present IN THAT MOMENT- without my smart phone or it's camera.

Instead of updating everyone on my romantic evening out, I should be looking more into my husband's eyes, not a screen.

The likes, the shares, the constant need for approval; it's not worth it.

It's not worth the time lost, the moments lost, the giggles missed, that look he gives you that you didn't see because you were too busy refreshing your page for a new like.

I am not absent from social media, but I am choosing to be more present in my real life-the life I should be totally focused on.

My kids do not care and never will care how many people saw a photo of us putting a puzzle together or baking cookies.
My kids DO care that when they are with their step mom, she is totally focused on them and her phone is put away.

They will look back and remember that instead of intently watching how many people liked the highlights of my relationships with them, that I was intently and intentionally focused on that relationship OFF of social media.

I have come to terms with the fact that my life can be great and I don't have to let the world know about it.

I can in fact survive day to day and not need approval or acknowledgment.

Social media is not the audience I should be trying to please.

I believe every relationship around me will improve by removing the constant pressure to inform you of my plans for the day.

I will be more apt to be in the moment, for THAT moment.

I want to capture time with my eyes, with laughs and with real hugs and real conversations instead of capturing life through a lens or a screen.

Life is going to be much more beautiful to look at when I'm really, I mean REALLY looking at it.

Who would want to see their loved ones' smile through a smudged iPhone camera when they could see it the way it was designed to be seen?

I have been cheating myself of genuine interaction and deceiving myself into thinking that just because everyone else lives through the blue square that I have to too.

Excuse me while I have things to see.

Really, really see.

Labor Pains of the Feminine Feminist

​She spreads her hands across the fresh linens, her wedding ring snagging the bedding covered in baseball bats and badly drawn helmets. The baby cries. There’s food, now unrecognizable on the floors and cheerios in her hair. She rocks the baby on her hip, warming a bottle and looks out at her suburban neighborhood. “Is this my dream? Or is this what I’m told my dream should be?”

​Every young woman knows the look; the one you get if you’re over the age of 21 and aren’t feeding a toddler with one hand and baking banana bread in your corner lot suburban dream house with the other. Time and time again women are lured into believing that they will never know true joy, true fulfillment until they hear the cries of their newborn babe and bare the labor pains of bringing a new life into the world. A woman will never truly be a woman until she wears a wedding band, is someone’s Mrs. and learns to put her family’s dreams in place of her own. She is told to stop dreaming, stop creating and to start searching for the nearest Whole Foods market to help ensure her little ones’ nutritional needs are being met.

​Young women are giving up their educations, their degrees, their chances to explore the tops of mountains or simply run their dream business for this idea of “true womanhood.” Forced to choose between motherhood and having their own identity apart from their children, many women have and continue to suffer with “Housewife Syndrome,” an epidemic mainly affecting middle-class women, also called the “feminist illness.” Housewife Syndrome symptoms included depression, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or simply just the desire to have their own identity and the undeniable gnawing question of, “Is there more?” This question proves dangerous to any woman longing for higher education, a career, or simply a life not involving late night feedings and finger-paints.

​Experts and Freud followers alike see this stirring as silly nonsense from neurotic women. “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” (The Yellow Wallpaper). Stay quiet, bake the bread, make the beds, iron his shirt, breastfeed your children. Instead of encouraging a woman to find herself in creativity or seeking a higher education, books on how to be the “Better Mom” and toilet train their two year old in three easy steps are forced down their already suffocated esophagus. Any woman who wants to be a surgeon, a politician or an engineer is just a sad, confused feminist, forgetting the true American dream: to be a stay at home mother, engrossed in the dreams of her children and the career of her husband.

Highlighting a statistic from Kathleen Gerson’s, “The Unfinished Revolution,” when a group of women were asked what they would do if they were no longer able to be in an equal partnership relationship, 75% of women stated they would rather divorce their partner than to remain a housewife. Not so shockingly, when a group of men were asked the same question, 70% of the men “said they hoped their wives would, ‘de-prioritize’ their career and focus on homemaking” (The Unfinished Revolution). Though told we are equals, when faced with the choice, we are told to back down from our dreams, our fulfillments, for his.Many women are convinced that putting off their own education to get a jump-start on child-rearing is the wisest, most feminine choice. The proof lies in the fact that 49%of stay at home mothers have a high school diploma or less (pewsocialtrends.org).

We are only equal when we know who we are as women without motherhood. We are only fulfilled when we know that we are not broken women when the desire to raise up children is lacking. We are told our minds must be changed; there is something wrong with us if we are not confirmed with our ultimate purpose while scrubbing urine stains from a crib or serving jellied toast to our husband as he whirls off to his career. We are applauded when we devote our lives to seeking out a husband and baring children and we are patted on the back, greeted with a shake of the head and a “Oh, honey…” when we chase our dreams and attempt to enter the work field.

We are taught to kiss our dreams and husbands good bye every morning, tuck away our self-fulfillment and sweet children every night, staring at a peeling wall of Yellow Wallpaper until we go mad. We do not want to dismantle motherhood, we simply want our rights back; our right to make bottles of milk or make cures, our right to discover ourselves outside of a hospital room, rearing a child in pain. We want to educate ourselves; create ourselves for ourselves, not our spouses or offspring.

The mother, the wanderer and the scholar are all women, all made with life to give. Sometimes, this life we bring into the world does not bare our genetics, but our dreams, our knowledge, our work made by our hands not our wombs. The feminist woman can in fact be a feminine woman, even without the cooking apron and spit-up cloths. We do not desire to trump men. We desire to be an equal to men; to fight beside them or work alongside them in a career. Women desire to choose to bare a child or to not, to stay at home to raise children or join the work force, or both. The feminine Feminist is saying, “We want to partner with you as your equal, in the home or on the battlefield and the opportunity to choose which is best for us.”

Women: Separate But Together

Let me start today's blog out with some background that might illustrate my message for you in a simple way.
When I was 14 and oozing wisdom, I had many female friendships.
We would talk about boys and hate other girls together.

They would tell me my hair was prettier straight and let me know who I should and shouldn't talk to in the cafeteria.
We all had that era in life of trying to be totally cool but in reality we were really monsters.
We got our heart broken by true love and lost best friends to 8th grade scandals.

Life hasn't changed much in the cafeteria of women.
We still hate certain women and have teams not every woman is welcome to join.

Instead of telling a girl how she should wear her hair (well, this probably still happens), we tell her how to raise her children or how to play her role as a wife.

We judge her if she puts her kids in daycare and works all day and we judge her if she stays at home until her children are of age.

We live in a Pinterest world where you should be always dressed your best, attending every kids sport game with "Billy's Mom" plastered on our shirts, baking desserts in our crafty houses that nobody should have time to bake, all the while aiming for those 6-pack abs jenny pinned last week.

Our social media feeds are filled with women who can pull a three course meal out of their perky, toned butts and still have time to be the number one mom.

Can I be real here?

Last week I barely had time to wash my hair one time, only read with my six year old once after night classes and the thought of making some crafty decorative wreath to hang on my door is nice...but who the hell has time to do all of that?

I do in fact throw chicken nuggets and fries in the oven at least once a week and sometimes I burn tomato soup while trying to watch something my boys want to show me or while typing up a paper.

I am all woman and all truth.

I can't even pretend to not be a mess because I don't even have time or energy to do that successfully.

The point here is that we are all women, doing life separately but together.

The homeschooling mother is just as real as the career woman working and attending her evening classes.

Each woman is trying to find her way in life and motherhood just as much as the next.

You might think your friend should be feeding her children more organic food and doing more yoga.
Well honey, she might think you should go out and "work" more.

The truth? You both need to embrace one another as individual women by empowering each other not degrading and dismantling.

Surround yourself with women who don't expect you to be a walking Pinterest board or those that disregard other women for their own pursuits.

How boring would life be if women all pursued the same dreams?

We are beautiful as a whole because we are beautiful on our own.

I don't know what you desire, but I want to surround myself with women who see me in my sweats and curly mess, my busyness, my crazy dreams and say "Go for it!"

I want to be engulfed in the encouragement of strong women and to be that strong woman myself.

I want to cheer on my friends who are raising babies at home and my friends who are traveling the world.

Neither is lesser in significance than the other.

We are all changing the world in our own wonderful way.

We can all be on the same team.

We can all sit at the same lunch table in this cafeteria.

Let us embrace our differences and celebrate them.

For you moms who can walk in heels and make crafts (make crafts? Do crafts? I don't know y'all) out of wood chips, I salute you.
You freaking go.

I'll balance the world out by living in converses and burning my soup and writing your stories.