Gummint: About your stepmother... Groo: My who? Wha?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Is someone who marries your absentee parent a “step-parent”?

My Y-chromosome donor (Y-chromo) divorced my X-chromosome donor (X-chromo) when I was one year old. He may have visited sporadically until I was about seven, but I don’t have any memories of that, and my older sister tells me it was on the order of once or twice per year, to see a movie and camp out in his apartment overnight. When I was seven, the guy disappeared entirely.

At some point he married Wife_2.0, producing my half brother (HB-01). I didn’t actually know this until, at 18, while back on the East Coast on a college break, I looked Y-chromo up (via a way-out-of-date business address, by people who would not tell me anything, but would forward my contact info to the next person in line). I met him and let him schlep me around to his relatives. At that point, I was 18, had never had an emotional connection to Y-chromo, and hadn’t met W2.0, nor my half brother HB-01. Somewhere in there I hope you catch that I had not been in the presence of W2.0 until after I was already in college, at a place far away from the East Coast.

Y-donor and I just never really hit it off. Blah-de-blah he drank himself to death (liver failure + bronchial pneumonia). A year later, HB-01 drank himself to death (alcohol poisoning -> coma -> death. The sum total of my time with W2.0 is about five hours, split into one brief meeting when I was 18, a couple of hours at Y-chromo’s funeral, and a couple more at HB-01’s memorial.

Now, the gummint is updating my security paperwork, and they have a new hire, along with a new, improved SF-86, that uses computers. The SF-86 is the form you submit, giving up just a small amount of your civil rights in order to get your clearance. I think the computer part is what caused this.

I know many other people who have half-siblings, and the general feeling I get is that, whether or not you know them or have ever met them, the spawn of one of your biological parents is your half-sibling. So I’ve generally noted the existence of HB-01, albeit with a complete lack of knowledge about him.

I’d always assumed that a step-parent would be someone you actually met at some point before you reached the age of majority, in the context of some sort of relationship with an actual parent. It didn’t ever occur to me that W2.0 might be considered my “step-mother.” But either the security person or the computer program went through the math: Half-brother’s brief existence implies mother of same, and therefore groo has or had a step-mother.

Does this make sense? Does anyone out there consider some future spouse of their absentee parent a “step-parent”? There are obviously things about familial relationships that are completely foreign to me, but this one makes no sense at all.

2

Of course she’s your step-parent. My father died after nearly 50 years of marriage to my mother. My mother remarried one of his oldest friends when I was 40. Jim is my step-father. That doesn’t mean he’s my father-substitute, it just means he was married to my mother.

StG

3

Yep.

4

It could be worse, groo. Les Nessman didn’t know his father was his step-father until the gummint told him.

5

Yeah, she’s your step-mother. Definitely not your step-mom, though.

6

Oh, weird. I guess I just now realized that my son has a step-mother. He did meet her, once, at her wedding to my ex, when he was…uh…five, perhaps? I’m pretty sure that was the last time he saw my ex, as well. He’s 16 now; I’m sure he has no memory of the event at all.

7

Huh. Well, I think that’s weird. Wikipedia seems to agree with you.

I’d like to add that, when I did meet her, she and Y-chromo were already divorced, so I’ve never been in her presence when whe was married to him. It still seems absurd.

Now it’ll probably slow things down, since I’m apparently admitting to having had a relative for all this time without reporting on her on all those forms I submitted in the past. They don’t like changes.

(Plus, she went back to the UK, so she’s a foreign contact!!!)

8

Would she be an ex-stepmother now?

9

I’d say that she’s not your stepmother unless she’s currently married to your father, so you don’t have a stepmother now and didn’t have one when you filled out the forms before.

10

Not your step-mother, then, right?

11

Technically speaking, my father’s wife is my stepmother. You’ll never hear me call her that, though. I had been living independently for over a decade by the time they got married, so she’s never played a mothering role in my life (especially since my father isn’t exactly top-notch in the fathering department).

So you may have to suck it up and refer to her as that when absolutely necessary for official purposes, but there’s no requirement that you actually mean it. :stuck_out_tongue:

12

Well, technically she was your step-mother while she was married to your dad, whether you actually met her or not…meeting her doesn’t make it more real! Now she’s your dad’s ex-wife, and your half-brother’s mom.

It was about two years after my ex had married the woman he left me for that our children and I were sitting at dinner one night, talking, and it dawned on us that they had a step-mother…and step-brothers! They hated her so much that it honestly had not occurred to us that the relationship existed! We were all totally flabbergasted when we realized it.

They still continued to refer to her as Evil Bitch. the only thing they had in common with their step-brothers was that they hated their mom, too!

13

Let’s see here… I have a half sister, an ex step-father and I guess I have a current step-father and 2 step-sibs. I kind of think my father got married to his current gf but he hasn’t said so. If that is the case I have a new step-mother and I think a few more step-sibs.

If there was a way to have an ex-mother I would have one of those also.

Love my half sister the rest are not part of my life.

14

Let me put it this way: she is (or was) your stepmother in the same sense that your Y-chromosome donor is your father.

15

I prefer the term “stepmonster”. And yes, she counts.

16

*“Mirror mirror, on the wall,
whose security clearance can I maul…?”

“While you you can screw her job, tis true,
The ass in the mirror you see is You…!”*

17

I’ve never used the term on an internet board before, and never thought I would on something so personal, but…

This?!?! (the ?!?! because you’re me in this case - down the the Canadia part - weird).

Never refer to her as step-mother, always as “my father’s wife”.

18

Pylon, I’m pretty sure the whole experience is more or less universal. I’ve got a few friends who have pretty similar stories, FWIW, and I picked up the “my father’s wife” from one of them.

But want to know what’s kinda funny?

I checked your profile and noticed you live in Ottawa, which is where my father and his wife live (though thankfully I do not, which spares me from having to attend “family” gatherings more than once or twice a year). Weeeeeeird. :slight_smile:

19

I don’t give a fuck what Wikipedia or most of society thinks. My mom’s current (third) husband is “my mother’s husband” or “firstname” and I do not refer to him as my stepfather. I also correct people who do so. I’ve never had to apply for a security clearance and the bar didn’t ask such a thing. Maybe it’ll go out of vogue to automatically apply such an intimate descriptor to that relationship. Seems kind of old fashioned to me.

20

Don’t be too sure of that.

I recently had to fill out the same or similar form that the OP mentions. They wanted information on my father-in-law, that is, my husband’s biological father who had died 10 years before I ever met my husband. Clearly, I never knew the man. (From what I’ve heard, that may be a good thing) Anyhow - the Feds are very insistent that that man is my father-in-law, although clearly I never met him, and never will.