🦃 Gratitude, schmratitude
Surviving the holiday season when you’re not feeling particularly grateful for stepfam life.
It’s an irritating irony of stepfamily life that during the holiday season, when everyone else is talking about gratitude and togetherness and the importance of family, many of us in blended families are struggling real damn hard to feel thankful for anything at all.
Traditional families get extra time with their kids at the holidays: school breaks, long weekends, traveling all together to visit the grandparents or whatever. In a stepfamily, that extra time can be its own stressor. It’s also just as likely we’ll end up with even less time than usual with our kids and/or stepkids, depending how the custody schedule falls.
Either way, enter all the mixed feelings, combined with the pressure we put on ourselves to create special moments and really really make ‘em count, which only increases this time of year. Can’t everyone just get along so we can make some happy memories together already?! Sheesh.
Stepparents already juggle a lot of stress and anxiety, which doubles (quadruples??) over the holidays. A disproportionate amount of holiday angst seems to land directly on the stepparent’s shoulders — like if anyone’s gonna be good sport this holiday season, it’d better be us.
So how do we escape this pumpkin-spice-scented pressure pot — or can we escape it at all? Is it even possible to stake out some calm amid all the chaos to just breathe a minute? Skip the drama and friggin' celebrate like a normal family? Focus on gratitude and the importance of togetherness like every other house on the block?
The answer is yes, absolutely we can.
But first let’s start by acknowledging just how hard feeling thankful even is. Even without high conflict, navigating stepfamily life gets mega complicated this time of year.
Struggling to find gratitude in stepfamily life
A while back, I read a well-meaning blog sharing tips for stressed-out stepparents over the holidays.
"Be flexible," the author advised. "If your stepkids are used to having pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving but you normally make apple pie, just make both!"
Sure! Just make both! Just double our own workload to make everyone else happy! 🙃 Totally no big deal.
Reminds me of the time that Dan suggested my stepdaughter and I cook Thanksgiving dinner together… only what SD actually wanted to cook was two different types of curry. Traditional, super-involved, cook-all-day curry.
I was like "Ummm Dan our stove only has 3 working burners and I already need 4 for Thanksgiving dinner. Couldn't SD just help me cook regular Thanksgiving dinner and we could do leftover turkey curry the next night?" And he was so mad that I didn't instantly, enthusiastically agree that he called me a Negative Nellie and stormed off. (Well… the Dan equivalent of ‘storming off’ which was basically him just silently and unhappily leaving the room.)
Luckily our dinner dilemma was solved by SD arriving armed with a couple giant Ziplock bags full of curry she'd already made with her mom. It's the one time I felt genuinely grateful for HCBM's determination to prevent any bonding activities between SD and me.
Anyway, my point is that the pies are not the problem.
The problem is that stepparents are already constantly, obsessively, full-time stressing over how to make everyone else in our stepfamily comfortable. We're already agonizing over how to connect with our stepkids, how to help them feel welcome and loved — even if we’re not feeling particularly welcomed or loved ourselves.
We're also juggling the complex logistics of planning out holiday details while mourning the loss of the holiday traditions we thought we'd have as adults with our own families.
And now we're supposed to make two kinds of pie too??
I feel like a more useful list of holiday tips for stepparents would include real-world advice like "How to prevent your angry tears from over-salting your gravy" or "6 quiet spots where you can always sneak away to scream into a pillow over the holidays."
Because yeah, we can make two kinds of pie. Sure we can. And we will, dammit, if that's what it takes for this hodgepodge mess to finally feel like a real family celebrating a real holiday together the way an actual family is supposed to.
But putting in all that emotional labor (plus twice the pies) for small (or not-so-small) humans who quite possibly don't want to be anywhere near us and almost for sure won't thank us can land somewhere between demoralizing and depressing. Especially during a time of year that's supposed to be about holiday cheer while we’re over here feeling anything but.
17 Coping Tips for Managing Overwhelming Stepparenting Emotions
When stepparenting feels thankless
Last week, a stepmom vented to me about her stepson's paper turkey project for school. She told me that every day he adds a new feather, and on that feather he writes something he's grateful for. It took a lot of feathers before one included her.
"I'm behind milk, cars, fish, food, his mom who doesn't do shit for him, and birds. What a thankless job," she said.
If that isn't ever the most perfect metaphor for stepparenting, I don't know what is. I've never been so integral to the success of a project while simultaneously remaining so invisible and unthanked.
And yet... there are these occasional moments.
Like, okay. That Thanksgiving curry.
The thing is, I'd planned to spend that weekend (happily!) alone, working on my novel for NaNoWriMo and answering to no one. Dan was supposed to take SD camping, and my kid was spending the holidays with her dad. But when my stepdaughter heard I planned to spend Thanksgiving by myself, she insisted on canceling their camping trip, telling Dan it wasn’t right for me to be alone on Thanksgiving. And this coming from the kid who at that time wasn't acknowledging me when she walked in the door.
My stepdaughter, the dichotomy. Just when I thought I had her figured out, she surprised me yet again.
It's the unexpected, half-buried hopeful nuggets like this that have kept me going through my toughest stepmomming years.
Looking for gratitude can be as simple as this: shift your focus to the tiny victories — those nearly invisible micro-wins that might not count as a positive to anyone but you. And hold those li’l suckers as close to your heart as you can.
Keeping expectations realistic while hoping for the best
Stepparents are optimists, all of us. Why else would we keep killing ourselves jumping through all these stepparenting hoops? We continually hope for the best, continually risk disappointment because we believe so fiercely that we can do better. Be better. That our families can be better, that our relationships with our stepkids can be better.
Today, that same stepmom sent another DM about her stepson’s paper turkey.
"Today he said balloons," she said. "So I might be behind a lot of things, but I'm ahead of balloons. I'll take it."
Stepparents: we’re behind a lot of things, but we’re ahead of balloons. And some days 'ahead of balloons’ is the best we can do. But maybe tomorrow — or next month, or next year — we’ll rank a little bit higher. Maybe our contributions will become a little less invisible.
Gratitude IRL
In old-timey days, people would hold a pleasantly-scented pomander up to their nose as they walked so they wouldn’t smell the literal shit in the streets. Gratitude, wielded properly, can work the same way to counteract our proverbial shit.
The goal of practicing gratitude isn’t to paint everything all rosy and perfect when it isn’t. The goal is to train your brain to look for the positives (I promise they’re there someplace) instead of knee-jerk hyperfocusing on the current disaster while simultaneously dreading the next crisis. Which is a really crappy way to live, speaking from personal experience.
And it’s absolutely okay to start small. It’s okay to get a little silly and sarcastic — Yayyy we finally worked out the holiday schedule and it was only WWIII for a solid month! 🙄 🤦🏻♀️
Gratitude IRL is like saying "Okay yes this sucks…. buuuut at least...” Acknowledging the difficulties while also acknowledging that yes, there are silver linings occasionally too.
A couple years ago, I picked "gratitude" as my word for the year. To say that year was transformative would be an understatement, but my biggest takeaway was this: gratitude is a choice.
Looking for those tiny victories — that's a skill that we can choose to practice. Or not. But if we do make that choice, then we'll find wins waiting there for us. Even if they're teensy, even if they're few and far between, they are there. If we choose to see them. If we work to see them.
Life in a stepfamily — especially if there’s high conflict — can stretch your mental capacity to your very limit. But finding a way to be grateful somewhere (anywhere!) within that mess helped me ride out the usual emotional rollercoaster with somewhat more tolerance. Possibly even some grace.
Maybe looking for the microscopic positives could help you too.
Blending is all about the tiny victories
Over on Instagram, I used to host Tiny Victory Tuesdays in my stories. New followers initially felt discouraged by this — they'd DM me saying they didn't have any wins to share. I'd remind them that all we're looking for is tiny victories and no win was too small to celebrate.
Gradually, even the most stressed-out stepparents started sharing hesitant wins like... "Well I guess I cried less this week" or "My stepkid didn't completely ignore me."
Tiny victories that couldn't possibly be considered wins by anyone other than stepparents who are deeply committed to finding that light at the other end of the tunnel. Tiny victories that absolutely, totally, 100% count as wins.
I remember wishing for huge, unmistakable wins myself — dramatic court victories and firm boundary-setting and admissions of wrong-doing by certain high-conflict exes. The sexy wins, you know?
Looking back, though, I find it's the tiny victories I treasure the most. That time my stepkid spontaneously hugged me when I surprised her by painting a fairy mural on her wall. That time the kids watched some show that made them laugh so hard they came staggering into our room trying to tell us what was so funny, but then they couldn’t even talk.
Those tiniest of tiny victories are the moments I hold closest in my heart. And I am so thankful that I didn't overlook them just because they weren't loud, massive wins all lit up in neon lights.
We all carry an image in our heads of what it means to be successfully blended. How we want the holidays to go. What our stepfamily will look like or act like once we’ve worked everything out and we finally feel like a “real” family.
The good news is, you’re already a real family. Blending is a process, not a destination. Celebrating the holidays imperfectly totally still counts.
What makes a blended family work isn’t the big stuff; the future of your stepfam isn’t riding on this holiday season. We become blended through hundreds of small successes and shared memories along the way. The holiday stuff, sure. But more so, the everyday stuff.
Look for those bright bits, those teeny tiny victories — or even just the non-sucky moments — and celebrate them for the wins they are. Those are the bread crumbs that will lead you to blended… eventually.
For now, they can at least just get you through the holidays.