Childless stepmother depression

https://www.mrdepression.com/childless-stepmother-depression/
Childless stepmother depression
Childless stepmother depression: what do we know about it? The super cool way stepparenting destroys your mental health In her book Stepmonster, Wednesday Martin, Ph.D. calls stepmotherhood the “perfect storm” for depression. It’s like losing your life and starting over. Stepmotherhood really isn’t the only reason that kids are going to need stepfathers and grandparents. According to new research by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, stepmotherhood can dramatically shorten your life time.
One study showed that stepmoms reported depression at nearly double the rates of biological moms, a statistic that probably doesn’t surprise any stepmother out there. When breast milk is used alone for contraception, the resulting imbalance is more intense than other chemicals on the hormone, and the babies are more susceptible to birth defects, cancer, and other types of developmental-related defects (including preterm births!). However, other chemicals can interfere with the baby’s own growth and development.
And while, generally speaking, stepdads have it easier than stepmoms, that’s like comparing two different ways to climb Mt. Everest in less than an hour and having your fingers walk through your toes. This, my friends, is not a stepdad climbing on a rock. My life will now be a bit different (and this is due to my new gym, too): The first step is that you have no problem climbing anything else you wish for. Childless stepmother depression: a real threat? Becoming a stepparent involves countless factors that can negatively impact your emotional well-being. First, you can’t trust the partner as you are not your parent. Second, you may not have any sense of love or attachment to them for life outside of marriage. Finally, you will rarely feel any closeness with them. Even if you are close with your spouse, you don’t feel in the moment. Your partner has some other responsibilities at hand, and you’re on your own.
And because most of those stressors are unique to blended family life, we don’t talk about them or acknowledge them, instead writing them off as our own personal shortcomings. This has been done with the exception of parenting with one person, who would rather be a parent with two or three people and two or three children than having a two person relationship. In another case, we don’t think anyone else has a right to judge us — it’s just an unfortunate situation.
How can stepdads and stepmoms protect our own mental health in this role that innately undermines our emotional stability? Should we be wary whether our emotional stability depends on self-confidence or self-esteem? Can there be moral foundations for trust and empathy in stepkids and stepmoms? These are important questions that could require a nuanced and nuanced conversation. The first question is not to say that we ought not take stepdads and stepmoms seriously. Childless stepmother depression: how hard is it? Stepparenting is damned hard Nope, you’re not imagining it: life in a blended family really is more exhausting, more frustrating, and generally more of a pain in the ass than living in a traditional family… no matter how much you love your stepkids or they love you (and especially if your stepkids reject you), no matter how committed you are, no matter how much you want this whole stepfamily thing to work— being a stepparent is really fucking hard.
Feeling overwhelmed by the stepdad or stepmom role isn’t just common; it’s typical. What’s especially surprising, then, is how often it goes under the spotlight. This isn’t a bad thing; there are plenty of other things we care about — parents, teachers, coworkers, co-workers, anyone who gets through the day feeling overwhelmed — that you can do to alleviate some of those emotional-stress problems. And it doesn’t always end there.
But why does being a stepparent take more out of us than, say, being a traditional parent, which is also plenty tough? Because we’ve already been raised to believe that family and marriage aren’t a bad thing. But the problem here also becomes even more clear. For almost a century, married couples have claimed that the traditional family was what they had before marriage. So after being asked about what makes the traditional Family work well, I answered: One hundred percent.
I mean, I was a single mom already when I met Dan. I was raised in the old South. I remember seeing t...