Highlighters, textas, crayons, come flying at my head. A series of rainbow projectiles hit the wall behind me. A symphony of near misses. It would almost be cinematic if it wasn’t so unsettling. I take a deep breath, pick up splayed inky innards from the carpet before they leave too much of a stain. I stuff some unbroken drawing utensils back into the pencil case. I try to talk her down.
She is my partner’s eleven-year-old daughter. Tonight’s explosive episode has been brought on by tension around whether she has to eat dinner. These kinds of outbursts are common, increasingly so. For whatever reason, I’m usually the only one who can get her through to the other side where she will be hot, sweaty, still seething, but calm enough to rest and regroup.
Her eyes are brumby wild in these moments.
‘Leave.’ Blue texta. ‘Me.’ Fluorescent yellow highlighter. ‘Alone.’ Orange crayon.
My partner enters the doorway. He tries to inject some fatherly discipline; natural, but as usual, unsuccessful.
Her cheeks turn a deeper shade of red.
‘I.’ Pink crayon. ‘Don’t.’ Brown texta. ‘Care.’ Purple highlighter.
I stand between the two of them, arms outstretched, tone soothing. Among the many roles I play in this scenario, peacekeeper is one. ‘Everyone just needs to calm down.’
In my head, a voice: what the fuck am I doing here? In my body: Fight? Flight?
I feel my nerves scattering like a dropped bag of marbles or the contents of a pencil case strewn across the room.
I’m not a mother. I have (mostly) never wanted to be one. Still, every now and then since turning 30, I covet all the babies I see. I envy the young mums at cafes and their endless conversations about preschools, preservatives and phthalate-free plastics. I tell myself that I would be that kind of mum. Earthy, careful, but not so careful that my baby develops allergies to everything.
The urge has always passed. I have tucked motherhood away in the back of life’s closet like a pair of shoes bought on a whim that will never be worn because, deep down, I don’t think they really suit me.
All of this was straightforward; until I fell in love with a man who already had two children. In the great catalogue of feminine identities I’d considered, this was never one of them. I wasn’t ready for the complexity of relationships that fall outside the parameters of traditional coupledom, family, and biological motherhood. I had no blueprint for what I could be to this man and his two young girls.
In stepping into this role, I have often felt a subtle kind of horror: my old certainty of self no longer holds. I hover in a space that is not at all mother but is not fully outside it, either. My presence feels both necessary and profoundly unsettling. Some days I braid hair, receive confided secrets, do cartwheels, and laugh so hard my sides hurt. Other days I am screamed at, insulted, and reminded that I don’t really belong and never will. I try to reconcile these two realities in my head and in my body.
This kind of horror is described by Julia Kristeva in her essay Powers of Horror (1980). Here, she talks about the unease provoked by the abject, that which threatens identity by settling in the void between self and other; 'the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite' (4). The self I knew is slipping away, yet the other world of café mums – of biological motherhood – is not even in the same solar system as where I now find myself.
My partner and his youngest daughter sit on the couch to watch a movie. I ask them to move over, to make space for me. She screams at me to leave. The next time I visit she lays across my body, playing with my necklace, talking like we are the oldest friends.
Since I started spending time with my partner and his two girls, I cry more than I ever have. As much as I try to be an adult and let words and actions roll over me like waves, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel at rest here. My therapist reminds me that even though I am choosing this role, it’s still a hard one to be in, and even harder for others to understand. My partner can support me and sympathise, but never really know how it feels to be on the edge of a family, never secure in my place, wondering if next time someone tells me to go, I won't be invited back. The unconditional love that comes from seeing small parts of yourself in another – the unwavering love of family – is not there to anchor me through storms.
Lately, I find myself thinking about how non-biological maternal figures illuminate the complexity of female identity and belonging. I think of the poetic way Julia Kristeva renders the abject as not peripheral, but vital – even radical. The abject is all that we reject in order to protect our sense of self. In its liminality it disturbs identities, systems, and order. If the Other exists as a social and linguistic category to define that which we are not, the abject is unstable and precedes the symbolic process of strict othering while still providing a contrast to the self.
‘The abject,’ Kristeva states, ‘has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.’ I have always been a childless woman, and the mother figure, my other. Not being a mother ‘settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning’ (2). I have been able to define my choice not to have children by a preference for freedom, a lack of maternal instinct, and a sense of uncertainty about the kind of world I would be bringing a life into. Now, as a partner to a man with children, this is also opposed to the ‘I’ who I was before, but I don’t even know where to begin defining my role.
Sometimes being around these girls bears similarities to the maternal – demanding care, selflessness, and guidance – but it can never traverse into the true maternal. At other times it resembles cross-generational friendship, creating its own rules and structures. At others still, it is adversarial, competing for attention, space, and the right to have one’s needs met. In this lack of definition is where the abject lies, and I am drawn ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva, Horrors, 2).
‘So you’re a step-mum now?’ One of my closest friends asks me with a wry laugh. She can’t imagine me at weekend soccer games or school pickups.
I cringe. ‘No, not at all.’
No matter how long I’m in the lives of my partner and his children, I never want to use that title. To me, it epitomises all the anxieties our culture has about threats to biological motherhood and the nuclear family unit. The common construction of the ‘stepmother’ is so often villainous; a monstrous outsider.
Until recently, I didn’t even know why we called these women ‘stepmothers’ and discovered that the ‘step’ prefix comes from the Old English word ‘steop’ meaning ‘bereaved’ or ‘orphan.’ Traditionally, the term ‘stepmother’ was used to describe a woman who takes on maternal care of an orphaned child. In modern blended families, most children still have both of their parents, and find themselves in situations that have additional adult care and relationships.
We don’t have language for this.
There’s another reason I don’t like this term. My partner’s ex has become upset on a few occasions because I have tried, in her opinion, to be a stepparent, and this falls outside my role. I do my best not to take this personally. I don’t know exactly what the accusation means but realise that it likely comes from a deep-seated rejection of the abject, which is evoked by my presence in her children's lives. If her children unsettle my sense of self, it’s understandable that I unsettle her identity as a mother.
These days, due to the frequency of divorce and marriage breakdown, additional adult care in children’s lives is common, but, according to my therapist, so are the issues that come with it. The relationship between mothers and the women that enter their children’s lives can be difficult to navigate because we do not stand in true subject/object opposition to each other any longer. A lacuna is opened where we must learn to coexist. As the children reach for each woman at different times, we reach for parts of each other across invisible time and space. We reach for the things we lack or long for, but do not have the courage to speak.
Sometimes I wonder if she is jealous of my freedom; the life I have lived in her hours of child rearing and tantrums and sacrifice and parental battles and late nights of holding another body so close she no longer knows her own boundary.
Sometimes I wonder if I am jealous of her motherhood; the unbreakable bond of blood that binds and will forever bind, the body that will be returned to in every sadness, the biological experience of creating a life and seeing it grow.
Of course, even if we feel these things deeply, we can’t say them, even to ourselves. The abject cannot be spoken. Instead, she asks that I never speak to her directly, only through my partner. I must never have any opinions or input into decisions. I must never ask anything from her. She wants me out of her periphery. She wants me to be invisible. She wants to reinforce that she is the mother, and I, the other, only, and always. There is nothing in between. The abject cannot be.
But here I am.
And here’s an idea: perhaps the same mix of psychological and physiological drives that make me want a child every few months are responsible for the fear response that the presence of non-maternal women in domestic settings call forth in our collective consciousness. If we sprinkle conventional religious and socio-political views on top, the abject non-biological maternal figure threatens the ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ order of motherhood and family. Rejecting the abject is integral to maintaining the status quo.
Most of what we learn about stepmothers from a young age comes from fairytales. In Snow White the wicked stepmother tries to kill the young maiden. In Cinderella, she fills the common trope of a mean, jealous, authoritarian. These figures paint a picture that maternal care cannot be felt towards children who are not one’s own.
I consider this representation in terms of my own experiences with my partner’s children. What qualities do they bring out in me? Often, they require me to put their needs before my own. To take extra care in being present with them. To show them in small yet significant ways that I care. I am grateful for the opportunity to develop these qualities, and for the way they also show me parts of myself I am less proud of. Sometimes I must remind myself that love is not a limited commodity, and that patience is key. When I am at the brunt of their anger, I must remember that we all sometimes act in ways that hurt those we care about and who care about us, and that forgiveness should flow easily.
Recently, the eldest daughter screamed at me that I shouldn't love her because I'm not even her parent. ‘But doesn’t that make the love even more profound?’ I asked both her and myself.
It does. Because this space of abjection not only presents me with some of the hardest challenges I have experienced, but also space for the most profound growth.
While I often feel alone in this experience, I know I’m not. Not really. There are many other women and men who have tread this path before and tread it now. They enter these spaces in one form and transform slowly, over the days and months and years, into another version of themselves. Not easy to define, but still tangible, and eventually whole. Each defines their role and identity along the way, not fitting a predefined mold, but creating their own reality.
I wonder, in inhabiting this liminal space, can I choose to experience the abject not as horror, but as a site of radical possibility? A chance to renegotiate identity, care, and belonging beyond the boundaries of biological motherhood? Can I renegotiate the terms on which I encounter the abject, not as something to be rejected–but as a threshold to new meaning?
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-231-05346-0.
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