"Love is a Tough Business"

On a recent podcast of "This American Life," a woman was featured who had adopted a boy from Romania that had spent the first seven years of his life confined to a crib in an orphanage. As a result, he had all kinds of issues once she brought him home to the United States, issues that included continous raging against his new mother and father, tantrums, screaming, stealing, and even what could have ended up being an attempt on her life.

Of course, everyone told this woman to put the boy in foster care; He clearly was beyond her control. But she refused to give up on him, even after he held a knife to her throat. She kept trying and, ultimately, it paid off.

When the narrator interviewed the adoptive mother, the woman was quite pragmatic and unemotional about her son's transformation, leading the narrator to reason that the only reason this woman was able to create love in a child who seemed incapable of loving, was that the mother didn't need his love. She was determined to continue working with him whether he ever loved her or not. Those of us who desperately need the love of someone else are the ones who generally are unable to generate it, the narrator surmised. In closing, she said, "Love is a tough business."

It struck me then that the narrator's final words epitomized the dilemma that so many stepparents face. Many of us feel unable to coax real love from our stepchildren because we so desperately need it. We need their love in order to feel validated as their stepmother or stepfather, we need their love so that we don't feel like a continual physical reminder that things between their mother and father didn't work out. We need their love as proof to our spouses that they made the right choice when they married us. We need our stepchildren's love so badly that we wear our hearts on our sleeves, and fly into unnecessary rages or get our feelings hurt over the most minor slights from our stepkids, slights that a regular parent, who already has validation as a Very Important Person in their children's lives, would be likely to overlook.

Love is a tough business.

I try to remember this as I engage in the battle to raise two teenagers who are, technically, not mine. My goal isn't, after all, for me to feel loved and warm and fuzzy, although that would obviously be nice. My goal is to send two women out into the world who are mentally and physically and emotionally prepared for what they are about to face. It will be far tougher than they even realize and if I'm caught up in my tender, bruised feelings as I teach them what they need to know, I won't be doing my best as their stand-in mom.

I think we as stepparents need to fully engage in the tough business that is love. We need to be less concerned about whether our stepchildren love us back, concerning ourselves instead with helping them grow up to be mature, loving, caring adults. If we're lucky, love will blossom in them as a byproduct of our efforts. But we have to raise them knowing that that love might not ever really flower, and to be okay with that.

"It will never go 100% smoothly around here," I told my husband the other day, "because families weren't meant to exist this way. Moms and dads were meant to stay together and when you mess with that, you're going to have problems. I just want to try and make as good a situation of this as we possibly can."

That might sound harsh, but that's just me, growing up and facing the reality that I can't waltz in like Mary Poppins and erase all the hurts and doubts my stepdaughters have endured over their family's fracturing and realignment. That's me, a stepkid myself, trying now to take on a blended family from the other side. That's me, doing the best I can (usually) and throwing myself into the tough business of stepmothering, the tough business that is love.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.