I was at an alumnae meeting for my all girls high school in the fall of 2017 and was so incredibly overwhelmed by my step-parenting “journey” that that room was the last place I wanted to be on a free weekend. We’d recently secured full custody of the two kids still at home but due to some of the drama in how that unfolded, had multiple therapists, court officials, and CPS engaged in our lives. There’s very little that I can think of that’s more humbling than having someone from Social Services do a home check to make sure your child has a bed to sleep in and food in the refrigerator.
Being at a breaking point and then participating in a group icebreaker is basically my nightmare. In fact, icebreaker activities are close to nightmares even without a layer of emotional instability. However, ever the rules and social norms follower, I found myself standing in a circle holding the hand of Julie, the kind of person who says they’re a life coach and any cynicism or skepticism you have about that term dissipates because, of course, this kind and calm human coaches others on living a more balanced life. We were all supposed to go around the circle and name something we were good at and something with which we could use some help. The latter part emphasized by Julie because, often, women don’t ask for help when they need it or see asking for help as something reserved for the really big things and not the every day.
We started with Julie and went to her left and, since I was to her right, I had some time to wait before my turn. I’d love to say I was patient but as with any icebreaker of any kind, I was deep in the world of overthinking what my answer would be when my time came. I really didn’t know what to say or what to ask for. I didn’t want to open up about everything I was struggling with—having spent the spring navigating a more bizarre and complex path to custody than what any lawyer would advise, I was sort of tapped out. My job was fine. My mother’s health stable. My marriage was great, except for anything that involved the kids.
While I continued to half-listen to everyone else, I did notice that the stories going around the circle were getting a lot more personal. The energy of the room had shifted a bit and the things people were sharing felt honest and vulnerable; the support in the room was wonderful to see. Women spoke about their intense feelings of being overwhelmed and needing more help to manage the day to day, the responsibilities of caregiving for parents and older adults, and the challenge of growing up a super achiever and needing to reconcile that with what is actually possible when your responsibilities expand beyond AP Calculus homework and making posters for school dances.
By the time my turn came, I was so lost in what others had shared that I had forgotten anything I’d prepared and I just opened up about all of it to this group of women—only 10% of whom I’d met before. I was crying while talking about the pressures of being a stepmom, being unprepared to take 100% custody even though I always knew it was a possibility, and the struggles in doing both of these things with kids who’ve grown up in an environment so foreign to my own (mostly) idyllic childhood. I don’t even remember what help I asked for but I was more honest in that group of women than I’d been with my closest friends in the previous few months.
Something magical happened in the moments that followed: I had several women 10-30 years older than I come up to me and share their own experiences as stepmoms and offer their support as people who’d been there. The specifics varied widely but they all knew how I felt being thrown into this family and feeling ill-equipped to juggle existing dynamics while simultaneously loving my husband and being lightly resentful that I was only in this position because I loved him so much.
One of them, Lyn, offered up a piece of advice, and it’s the most important thing I can offer to anyone who ends up on the stepmom journey: lower your expectations as far as possible. I politely said “oh, I know, I know.” Lyn replied “no, Karen, you really don’t.” Lyn is a white collar criminal defense attorney and despite being a foot shorter than I, spoke with the kind of force that cut through any internal monologues and facade I’d put up.
She continued, pointing out that since I already have high expectations of myself and others, lowering them a little was probably still keeping them too high for my new family to reach. “You need to keep your expectations on the ground and be pleasantly surprised by anything else that happens. You have very little control in this dynamic, you will burn yourself out trying to make everyone happy and, if you succeed, they’ll just credit their father. You have to have zero expectations.”
That level of harshness might be more than what I’d say to others—and may explain why I work in the customer experience space and am not defending white collar criminals—but every word of it is true. At this point, in my marriage and life, I can comfortably agree with Lyn and add that the circumstantial cases where high expectations might be beneficial are so rare that the likely risk wildly outweighs the potential reward.
So wherever you are on this journey, lower the bar. Then lower it some more. Then dig a hole and put your expectations underground. And when you inevitably find yourself frustrated that you had to lower it again, know that you have company and come here to complain about it. Sometimes the most radical act of self-care is admitting that zero expectations are the best ones to have.
