Thanks for the feedback, Cindi

I like to say feedback is a gift, but not this time.

Almost two weeks ago, I received this delightful message as a Substack DM from someone named Cindi.

Cindi didn’t leave this as a comment on a post where I wrote about my kids, but rather subscribed and sent it as a direct message to me. Pretty much ensuring I couldn’t ignore it.

I immediately wondered what bougie and horribly unempathetic things I’d written to drive Cindi to put so much effort into letting me know she hated me. But my last three posts have been about disliking corned beef and cabbage, arguing with my now ex-therapist about favorite child dynamics, and the old boys’ club in the workplace/on the US men’s hockey team.

Perhaps that last one was the inspiration? Cindi read “Yes, you are the asshole” and took it as a challenge?

When I started this space, my intention wasn’t actually to write exclusively about step-parenting. It was to write as a whole person — someone who happens to be a stepparent, and a wife, and a former executive, and a woman with opinions about the Olympics and her mother’s cooking and her own therapist’s blind spots. The step-parenting books I found were all written for someone trying to understand the kids. I wanted something that just said: you’re not crazy, this is weird, and you’re going to have to figure it out anyway because you’re a grown-up who fell in love with a man who had children already.

What I learned quickly is that no matter how intentionally I write as a whole person, there will always be someone for whom I am only the stepparent. Cindi wasn’t responding to what I wrote. She was responding to what I am, or, more specifically, what she’d already decided I was before she read a word.

There’s also a lot I haven’t written — things that are ultimately the kids’ stories and not mine, things I’m still in the middle of, things I’d need to be fully out of the woods on before I could find the words. Things where I haven’t figured out how to put them out into the world without creating drama in my family. My list of “write this later” topics is long. Consider that your incentive to stay subscribed!

Reaching new people on the internet where you’re just a name/photo means people really only know you for what you put out there. They lack the context on all experiences that have led up to that moment and bring their own baggage to the experience you might be sharing. That’s been a learning experience for me as certain posts I’ve written have gained traction and resulted in comments, direct messages, and other notes calling me names and threatening me. Since launching this site I’ve had three posts go semi-viral and enjoyed everything from people calling me a sociopath to a whore to wishing death upon me (never directly threatening it, just letting me know they’ll be so happy whenever I do die).

Despite having been involved in social media and online communities since the dawn of their respective times, I somehow still am able to be shocked by what someone is willing to say to someone they don’t know in writing online. Given that I worked with the social care team of a major cable company when they had an outage for a couple of minutes during the “Game of Thrones” season finale, you’d think that I would have a pretty healthy understanding of how nasty the internet can get.

Cindi is barely a drop in the bucket in terms of both nastiness and range, but I should have been more prepared for negative comments than I was.

At first, I got defensive. She sent this when my last three posts hadn’t even been about my kids. And I have tremendous empathy for the kids in my family — she doesn’t even have all the context on how much we’ve navigated together and how far we’ve come! I’m not necessarily going to argue with someone about how “bougie” I am, but when I ignore a grammatical rule it’s usually deliberate to allow for my own natural voice and its many, many tangents.

And then I read this and thought “wow, what a pin on the stepmom experience.”

Cindi comes out of nowhere, tells me I have no empathy, tells me I whine about everything, and also tells me I’m not and “never will be, their parent.” In a space that I built where I say it’s about the stepparent experience and how marginalized and unnatural it can feel, I get to be criticized and marginalized by Cindi.

I can move past sociopath. I can move past whore. Those say everything about the person sending them and nothing about me. But Cindi didn’t reach for an insult. She reached for a fact. “You are not, and never will be, their parent.”

She’s not wrong. That’s the whole thing. That has always been the whole thing.

I didn’t write last week. Not because I was too busy or because I ran out of material, but because Cindi’s message sat in me and did exactly what she probably hoped it would — made me wonder whether I had any business writing about any of this at all. Whether this whole space was just elaborate whining from someone without standing to speak.

I’ve decided that’s exactly why I have to keep writing it. Not to prove Cindi wrong, but because the silence is just a different version of the same problem: a woman in this role, making herself smaller, taking up less space, staying in her lane. I’ve been doing a version of that for years in other spaces, and I’m not planning on doing it here.

The world is full of Cindis. I’ll keep blocking them.

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