Status Games with Names
Humans label everything
I sometimes like to think of weird things that might have extremely large numbers assigned to them.
How many breaths each and every creature that’s ever lived has taken.
How many times you’ve eaten lunch. (Thousands!)
How many times your name has been called.
When your family dissolves by divorce, you’re not expecting to add extra names to the list of cast members in the future. But clearly, it’s a regular occurrence.
And when you marry into a new stepfamily, it can feel vaguely insulting to have the name of the ex-wife randomly interjecting itself into our every day.
And yet, there they are: the unwanted.
The new woman in our lives.
Even the terms we use for each other are loaded:
The bio-mom.
Just the stepmom.
The crazy ex-wife.
The evil stepmother.
Creating walls with words
Why do we speak this way about each other?
When our aim is to cut the other woman’s legs out from under her before she even gets started, we should question our motives.
Do stepmoms ever refer to their own husbands as the “bio-father”? Or is he simply, “the dad?”
Are divorced moms aware of the fact that stepmoms are very likely performing most of the hands-on tasks to take care of the children? As women, we already know: how can anything be “just...” about that?
ALL of those ex-wives can’t really be crazy. There’s too many of them.
And why are we still living in a culture where the cheap and easy trick for creating a villain in a kid’s movie is to give them a stepmom?
So it’s good to ask....
What might we secretly fear about the other woman?
What power are we attributing to her that we want to take away by denigrating her name?
In what ways might we be totally clueless about who she really is?
And isn't it a shame that we don't have a name to use for each other that acknowledges our familial ties to each other? One that allows for the potential growth of love and affection?
