There’s No Place Like Home: Advice for Stepmoms Who Experience Outsider Syndrome By Mary T. Kelly, MA
It doesn’t matter how old you are: “There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!” For most of us, these pleading words are as familiar as the sun rising in the East.
In “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy was lost and had to find her way back home. This was no easy endeavor. She went through trial after trial, faced perilous odds, came up against deception and, ultimately, found redemption. Oh, the roads she had to travel first to get there!
What about you? Now that you’re in a stepfamily, does your home feel like the kind of place you want to retreat to quickly—clicking your heels three times, as you repeat Dorothy’s familiar refrain, to hasten the return?
Or do you have little desire to say, “There’s no place like home,” because yours feels like anything but? If so, it may be a breeding ground for Outsider Syndrome.
Before you joined this ready-made family, you may have experienced your home as a sacred space. Yet, afterward, your new reality may seem more like a series of regularly-scheduled home invasions. If you’re a custodial stepmom, there may be little light at the end of that tunnel.
The thought of sacred space has suddenly become both laughable and unattainable.
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