The Wicked Stepmother Myth

Mother,
Always caring,
Always giving,
She was the one who stood by you even when you were wrong.
That’s why you took her for granted!

That is the idea I grew up with. Losing my mother was the last thing I had thought would happen to me. Death was something that happened to other people. But when it did, it shattered me. I was just 12.

I thought that was the end of my world. My brother was just 8 months old and sister 10 years old. The thought of what would happen next scared me.

Then, I overheard my relatives talking about getting a ‘new’ mother. I was devastated. I had never thought a ‘step-mother’ would happen to us. Then reason prevailed. Someone has to take care of my brother, I told myself.

But he was being sent to my aunt’s place, so why did WE need a mother? I thought it was a conspiracy against me and my siblings. The idea of a stepmother scared me. I had seen ‘them’ on television and in films, read about them in books. They were always so scary.

Then she came. I did not talk to her for the first few weeks. She was not the ‘right’ person, I told myself. I wanted to grow up fast so that I could look after my younger brother and sister.

Time passed. Life began getting back to normal. But some things changed. People were generally more sympathetic to me. My old aunts would refer to me as the “poor orphan”. They also talked about how great my mother was. Some old people used to cry holding me or my sister.

Two years went by. My brother returned home. He was approaching three and had begun putting words together to make broken sentences. For him, my aunt was ‘mother’, so when he was asked to call my stepmother ‘mother’, he was completely lost. He suddenly had two mothers. For a child who had just figured out that a dog barks and a cat mews, this was a bit too much of a confusion.

Looking back now, I feel that is when he must have developed the sense of insecurity he carries around like a baggage now. He began sleeping with chapattis rolled under his pillow, he started collecting things in some obscure corner of the house… Perhaps, he was preparing to flee from this strange new world.

I was not his brother, my cousins were. And I will never know what I was to him in those days. But for me and my sister, he was a part of my mother who had to be looked after. We believed that it was our duty to see that he was not ill treated by my stepmother.

These are the thoughts we grew up with – collecting grudges all along. But we never blamed our father. After all, he was our father. He could not harm us.

But, the stepmother could. We had seen it in films. We knew that stepmothers became evil when fathers were away. So we waited for that day when she would throw us out of home when our father was away.

We waited and waited. One, two and then three years passed. Nothing happened. We got to know our new mother better. She would cook for us, take us to the market and look after us when we fell sick.

But the threat still existed. She was a stepmother, she was bound to become evil some day, we told ourselves. And my brother continued hoarding stuff for his impending departure.

One day, when it was raining outside, my mother brought in the dry clothes and left the wet ones out. It so happened that all of them belonged to my brother. All hell broke loose. To add to this, we also had a stepbrother by then. So, we thought, this was it. This was the grand finale in which all of us would be driven out.

But, nothing happened. Amid all this, my father was busy with his work. We met him only on holidays. He seldom had time to take us out. So we went to our native village to spend our summer holidays.

Now I am thirty and married. My sister is married too and has a beautiful daughter. My brother is all set to join some engineering college. He drives a flashy motorbike and listens to ‘fat boy slim’. My stepbrother is still in school. My father heads a private firm and my mother is a homemaker.

Sometimes, I wonder whether we are still waiting for that ‘thing’ to happen, fearing which we lost quite a few smiles in our childhood. Perhaps we are, in some corner of our hearts.

But times are different now. I’m at an age where my parents were when I was twelve. And when I put myself in their shoes, I realise how stupid I had been, how I spoilt a lifetime fearing something that never came to be.

Looking back, I often analyse the past. I think of the ideas that were planted in my head; of the books I had read which said that a mother is all goodness and a ‘new’ mother all evil; the films I had seen which typecast people and relationships, or the aunts who cried over the dead and blamed the alive for all that happened. And to a child’s mind, that becomes the truth.

Had we known that a mother can also make mistakes, our lives would have been entirely different. Our ‘motherless’ lives would have been far saner, had someone told us these simple facts:

Mothers are also human.
Mothers, too, make mistakes.
Mothers can die.
Stepmothers are as gullible as your own mother.
Stepmother – the word does not necessarily mean ‘evil’.
Having a stepmother, after all, is not such a bad idea!
But we were not told about it. And today, whatever I do or try, things can never be the same again.
A lot of water has already passed under the bridge.