The evil stepmum story is just so hard. Not least because it so fundamentally shaped how we see ourselves.
Even where a stepmother has the best intentions and tries to do the right thing, her actions get filtered through the misogynistic stepmother story and she starts to believe this to be the truth of what happened.
You see this on this board regularly in relation to the very deeply entrenched idea that SMs are being deceitful and somehow trying to trick everyone to 'land their man' in the beginning. And how many women start holding their hands up and finding themselves guilty of it.
Rather than casting her as a nasty deceitful woman who pretends to be 'super stepmum' so she can dupe the poor, naive father and then, once she's got him, she can start plotting to get rid of the kids, maybe we might want to recognise that women try hard in the beginning ^because they have the best intentions'.
What actually happens is that a woman meets a man with children. She's a good person and she wants to do the right thing. Yes, it's the start of a relationship (or, often, it's now a well established relationship with him and it's time to try to build a relationship with his children) so there's an element of everyone putting their best self forward. The adults anyway.
But she is a good person and she is very aware of two strong cultural messages: 1. The children must always come first, and 2. Stepmothers are usually evil. She recognises that he has children, so she needs to go all in with trying to build a positive relationship with them, to put their needs first, to help him out with the wife work (because that's a third strong narrative about women's role in life). And she's determined that she IS a good person, so she definitely won't be one of those SMs who hate those precious children. She won't be cold and distant and horrible. She's not like that. She loves this man and she wants to love his children too.
No one is sitting there plotting to trick the poor hapless father and then usurp the children.
But what happens is that she tries really, really hard. The children aren't on board with this. They resent her and are hostile in various ways. The nicer she tries to be, the worse this seems to get. Adults around her suspect her motives and see her as some pathetic try hard desperate to get her man. She is trying to show everyone that she just is a good person who happens to love a man with children. And she wants to have a happy stepfamily where everyone loves one another.
As times goes on, the man takes all her efforts and wife work for granted. His fear-driven guilty dad parenting takes its toll on everyone in the household. The SM becomes the ideal scapegoat for everyone else to blame everything on. She becomes angry and resentful of this crap told she never asked for, and for all her good intentions being used against her. She withdraws but I'm doing so becomes that evil SM and therefore even more blameable. This erodes her sense of self in all sorts of ways.
She comes on MN and agrees with people that she was trying too hard because she must have been some desperate fool out to trick some poor man. She should have been more reserved and not tried to kid everyone she was super step mum.
But... then she'd have been cold and evil from the outset.
And still no one is looking at the role the man plays in driving this dynamic. We're all too busy blaming the SM. And she's blaming herself. What is wrong with her that she feels this way about children?
There's a completely unrelated thread in active convos at the moment that shows how deeply ingrained misogyny is even without the added SM crap. A woman burnt herself in a restaurant and her husband refused to even acknowledge the injury never mind helping her. Yet the thread is full of people claiming she's doe dreadful needy drama queen for wanting her husband to give a shit. It seems almost that she should be apologising for hurting herself and putting him in the dreadful position of having to purposefully ignore her. Must have really spoiled his meal, all the fuss she was making trying to deal with a painful burn.
That same weird misogyny runs through everything to do with stepmums. And it's so toxic. But it works really well to shift attention away from the fathers or even to generate sympathy for their plight.