Musings from the Evil Stepmother, Evil? … Well, Maybe

The summer my daughter was three, she developed a debilitating fear of wicked witches. Bedtime became a nightly quest to banish possible witches from closets and corners where they might be lurking with their long fingernails and sinister cackles to pounce on my hapless child as soon as I left her room. This was also the year that my marriage to her father ended, the year we sold our house and moved to a strange new apartment, and the year I met the man I would later marry, bringing an imminent stepfather and stepsister into her life. I’m no therapist, but it wasn’t impossible to draw the connection between all of the ways her life was out of control and her need to rout witches out of every crevice. 

While trying as best I could to help her with life transitions and wicked witch containment, I also was trying as best I could to wrap my head around the concept that I would become a stepmother. As any avid reader of fairy tales knows—and show me the parent of a three-year-old girl who isn’t one—stepmothers come in one-size-fits-all. Evil. My daughter and I both had fairy tale villains roaring off the page to dominate our imaginations that hot, sticky July, four years ago, when I fell in love and changed her life.

One Saturday afternoon, to escape the heat of the un-air-conditioned apartment, I took my daughter to a marionette show of Hansel and Gretel. We sat on the floor of the cool, darkened theater with a dozen other parents and children. I pulled my daughter into my lap and held her tight. 

“There’s a witch in Hansel and Gretel,” I said to prepare her for what I hoped would be a manageable and hopefully helpful encounter. She nodded, all big-eyed and serious. After thinking for a while, she turned her face back up to mine. 

“Is the wicked witch a stepmother?” she asked.  I immediately bristled. “What? No, of course not,” I answered, although after a moment’s thought myself, I realized that the question was perfectly logical, given that in her favorite fairy tale, Snow White, witch and stepmother were interchangeable.