When I was 23 and met my husband, he had an eight-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son and I had a ready-made family. The only problem…the children already had a mother.

Life as a step mom is tough, really tough, and it should be.

If I had known at 23 what I now know, I would have insisted that my head rule and not my heart. Being young and stupid actually gave me the necessary naivety to believe I could find a positive role to play in a broken family, and that love and patience could conquer anything. I was right, but it took someone else’s wisdom to make it happen.

The children are now 23 and 20. I love them fiercely. They are my children, too. But they never could have been my children if their mother had fallen into the clichéd relationship of woman against woman…sure we had our alley cat moments spitting and clawing at every exposed nerve, but not once did she stand between me and her offspring. In fact, she encouraged my relationship with her children.

She understood better than I did that her son and daughter would have a more meaningful connection with their father if they also had a connection with the woman to whom he was now married. She knew that a child couldn’t be loved by too many people. She was wise to see that having a second pair of multitasking female hands around, even those of a supposed adversary, was sometimes to her benefit. I could help with transportation and homework, laundry and scrapped knees. I could stay up late worrying, I could dispense hugs just as well as anyone who’d given birth, and I could love unconditionally. I kept track of all the details a man would let fall between the chasms of his personal and professional life. I am the other mother.

Not until my husband and I had a child together did I appreciate the sorrow and frustration that must have existed, and sometimes still does, when a mother has to share her role. Together, my husband and I make all the decisions for our son, Aaron. In a stepfamily everybody thinks they get to have input, and they do.

Over the last decade I’ve often said my stepchildren’s mother deserves tremendous credit for being able to rise above the cat fights and to nurture my relationship with her children. Last week I had an opportunity to share this story with a young woman who has put herself in the ridiculous position of having an affair with a married man and developing a relationship with his two-year-old daughter yet she and the assumedly soon-to-be ex wife can’t stand the sight of one another.

The two women each feel righteous, but I hope they soon realize that not only will they have to be in the same room; they will have to work together for the rest of their lives. If they don’t like the idea, if they can’t stomach the notion of having each other as family, of celebrating holidays and birthdays together, of being grandmothers together, than they should accept right now that the little girl caught in the middle of all this stupidity will pay for all their grown up mistakes.

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