‘Stepmom’ Kills With Kindness

Along with thousands of other moviegoers, I went to see “Stepmom” this holiday season. Loved the movie. Resented the stereotype.

Just when we thought stepmothers had survived the bad rap created by “Cinderella,” along comes an archetype even more insidious: Julia Roberts as the stepmom angel--a celestial beingwho smiles beneficently every time someone in her new family treats her with even less respect than accorded the family pet (in this case, a rabbit).

As her children hurl profanities at her with the speed of Nintendo 64, poor Julia thinks it’s her fault. Darn it! She was so busy with her career, she forgot to learn how to be a parent. Of course, the painful scene where an unevolved stepmom screams at her future husband to get his kids in line, or she’s outta there, was left on the real-life cutting room floor.

Instead, our Hollywood stepmom gives up her career, her self-respect and her Clinique lipstick to become a modern Mary Poppins on a mission to repair her troubled brood.

With just a spoonful of honey, she soothes her stepdaughter’s hormonal upsets, sings away her stepson’s injuries and even teaches their stuffy mother how to bond with her children by taking in a Pearl Jam concert on a school night. Our Julia, 20 years younger than real Mom, may not be parent-savvy, but she sure does know her rock groups.

Her generosity abounds. She meets her adversary over drinks to mull over which mother their daughter will want when she takes her own walk down the aisle. (A walk, I may add, she won’t be making without a hundred years of therapy, but that’s another movie.)

Of course, the missing link in this family chain is absentee Dad, who, with his pager furiously beeping, appears too busy at the office to deal with family trivia. He’s content to unload his emotional baggage squarely on the wings of his beloved. And our stepmom angel complies.

Don’t get me wrong. I went to this movie and cried with the best of them. But for all the stepmoms juggling umpteen traumas and conflicts for a few moments of blended family peace, I feel compelled to say: We are not heaven-sent. We lose our tempers and our patience. We do not take kindly to being poisoned by vengeful hot chocolate. Even if it is “pretend.” And while we are sympathetic to the children uprooted by divorce, we do not appreciate our spouses (or their ex-wives) reinforcing misplaced anger generated long before we came on the scene.

I wonder how many kids are pouring out of movie theaters clutching tattered Kleenex, ruing the day they inherited us, the wicked stepmoms, instead of that sweet, sexy angel with the cool hats. If I’m to choose, I’m kind of thinking it would be easier to be the wicked stepmother. At least in that fairy tale, my floors got cleaned. And I didn’t have to be as thin as Julia Roberts.