{"id":141555,"date":"2019-12-25T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2019-12-25T16:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141555"},"modified":"2019-12-16T13:52:22","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T18:52:22","slug":"the-evil-stepmother-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/12\/25\/the-evil-stepmother-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evil Stepmother"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 6, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905<\/p><\/div>\n

The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job.<\/p>\n

I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband\u2019s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. \u201cThis isn\u2019t one of your fairy tales,\u201d my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn\u2019t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail.<\/p>\n

When all my husband\u2019s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry.<\/p>\n

On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. \u201cPlay with us,\u201d they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth.<\/p>\n

I love my stepdaughter, but I don\u2019t love being a stepmother. It\u2019s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn\u2019t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn\u2019t belong to you.<\/p>\n

Read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mirror, mirror on the wall.\u00a0Who is the motherest mother of them all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60329],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2019"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Evil Stepmother by Sabrina Orah Mark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mirror, mirror on the wall.\u00a0Who is the motherest mother of them all?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/12\/25\/the-evil-stepmother-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Evil 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