Yes, they are your stepsisters. But you can refer to them as evil stepsisters if you like. It has a poetic feel to it.
In my world?
- sisters
- cousins
I come from a fairly small family; we do not distinguish between relatives by blood and relatives by marriage (we don’t have any relatives by adoptions, that I know of) (no, I tell a lie, I do have an adopted first cousin once removed; I’d forgotten she was adopted). I have nieces that are no relation to me by blood, marriage, or adoption; however, I never refer to one of my nieces brothers as my nephews.
What I get bogged down on is how to refer to the parents of some of my relatives: “my niece’s mother” sounds like part of a logical puzzle …
(I so enjoy referring to my stepchild’s mother as “the mother of my child”, but that won’t be turning heads for much longer).
I understand the confusion over how to refer to relatives my marriage after the marriage has been dissolved, but why aren’t you comfortable calling your aunt’s children your cousins? Is it the adoption, the ethnicity, or the age difference?
When my ex-husband remarried a woman with two sons, it didn’t occur to ANY of us…the two of them included…that my kids now had a step-mother and step-brothers. The terms were so far from our minds (she was The Bitch Dad Married and nothing else to my kids) One day the kids and I were sitting around talking about their recent visit to their dad’s, and they mentioned meeting TBDM’s sons, and talking about the fact that those boys hated her too and told my kids that fact…when it suddenly hit us…those boys were my kids’ step-brothers!
Up until that moment the thought had not occurred to us at all. My kid’s only jokingly referred to the boys as stepbrothers after that…there was truly no relationship at all…and now that that marriage has ended, they think of it as a curiosity.
I was raised with their oldest daughter and she will always be my first cousin. I only have six first cousins total. The Chinese kids are great but the youngest one is barley older than my oldest daughter. I am 35 years old and my daughter is 6. The combination of age and ethnicity makes the terminology a little hard.
That’s … fascinating.
OK, I was going to say “weird”, because my family uses “cousin” very broadly; our parents’ siblings (and their spouses) were “aunts” and “uncles”, and occasionally we’d use ‘great-aunt’; everyone else is just a “cousin”. [Knowing the difference between a second cousin and a first cousin once removed is nice, but using the terms really slows down a conversation.] I guess I still expect everyone to use cousin as a generic term.
And we never make a distinction between relatives by blood and by law, while the marriage is intact; if the marriage dissolves, the relationship is defined by personal choice.
And I don’t stand on a point of law when kids are involved; if a couple has set up house-keeping without benefit of clergy, I’ll refer to any child by the title the law would bestow. (Usually …)
(Call the kids your cousins, and watch people suddenly expand their definitions of family in response.)