Pity The Poor Stepmom

By Kathryn Harrison
Published: August 25, 2000

Last week's report of three studies showing that children raised by stepmothers are likely to receive less food, health care and education than children raised by their biological mothers should not have come as much of a surprise -- especially to mothers. However impolitic it may be to ask, who really believes that stepmothers can possibly replicate the care of the original mother, notwithstanding the moist optimism of movies like ''Stepmom,'' in which the earnest efforts of Julia Roberts are enough to secure a stepchild's happy future?

Mothering, be it by way of the womb, marriage or adoption, is relentless, even under the best of circumstances. Despite the cultural myth that mothers have an endless capacity to give, their means of expressing love -- their time, energy and material assets -- are finite.

And stepmothers, no matter how devoted, may be hampered by a combination of factors unique to their situation: a lack of basic factual knowledge about the child, the complicating presence of the biological mother, the hostility of stepchildren traumatized by divorce, the father's unwillingness to interfere, and their own sense of alienation from the tribe of the original family.

The new studies, while in no way suggesting that stepmothers are wicked or consciously negligent, oddly dovetail with our culture's traditional suspicion of them. Portrayed in fairy tales, the stepmother is a grasping woman who favors her own offspring, no matter how ill-deserving, over those of an earlier, presumably dead, wife.

As the stepchild's fortunes unfold in the original Grimm's version of Cinderella, it's not a fairy godmother who dresses the unloved stepdaughter for the prince's ball and thus vouchsafes her future in the castle, but a magic hazel tree growing above the grave of Cinderella's own dead mother, a tree inhabited by a ministering white bird -- her mother's hovering spirit.

Ann Case, the Princeton economist who was the chief researcher in the three studies, was surprised to find that contact two or three times a month between the stepchild and his or her biological mother was sufficient to raise the child's health care status to the same level as that of those children who live with both biological parents. But what if the biological mother of the stepchild is dead? Basic health care -- measured as a medical checkup within the last year -- plummeted, she found.

Stepmothers in fairy tales derive from a harsher agrarian epoch, when resources were scarce and life, especially childbirth, a much dicier proposition. If we can ignore their tendency to represent good and evil unalloyed, such stories remain pertinent as repositories of the human dynamic in our own post-industrial society, when motherhood is increasingly nonbiological, though not for reasons of morbidity. In Grimm's ''The Juniper Tree,'' a stepson is sacrificed to safeguard the fortunes of his half-sister. Resurrected as a many colored bird, he flies from the branches of the tree that bears his mother's spirit. With eyes like stars and a song whose verses enumerate the injustices he suffered, the brother ultimately restores order to the family.

Perhaps we can use studies like the ones from Princeton to that same end: to reveal inequality and achieve a finer balance. More than half of today's children will live apart from at least one biological parent by the time they reach 18. The stories of their families will point up not only how hard it is to be a stepchild, but how complicated and challenging is the role of the stepmother.

Kathryn Harrison is the author, most recently, of ''The Binding Chair: Or, A Visit From the Foot Emancipation Society.''