{"id":4084,"date":"2025-07-23T08:11:24","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T08:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martinemussies.nl\/web\/?p=4084"},"modified":"2025-11-05T10:33:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T10:33:31","slug":"the-invisible-grief-of-almost-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinemussies.nl\/web\/the-invisible-grief-of-almost-motherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"The invisible grief of almost-motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published in The Daily Telegraph<\/em>‘s Stella<\/em> magazine, this feature by Julia Llewellyn Smith explores the invisible grief of \u2018almost-motherhood\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Why I\u2019m Sharing This Now<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, a forgotten piece of writing resurfaces at exactly the right moment. Years ago, I was interviewed for Stella<\/em>, the Sunday magazine of The Daily Telegraph<\/em>, about a chapter of my life I had, perhaps understandably, tucked away. At the time, it was raw. Tender. Difficult to talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, with the clarity that distance brings, I can see just how important\u2014and still relevant\u2014this story is. It’s not simply about heartbreak, or the painful complexities of blended families. It’s about the deep bonds we form with children who are not biologically ours, and the grief that comes when those bonds are suddenly severed without ceremony or closure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a world where the legal system often overlooks these invisible ties, and where non-traditional forms of caregiving are still under-acknowledged, sharing stories like this matters. It speaks to others who might have loved\u2014and lost\u2014in the quiet role of \u2018almost-parent\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope that by publishing it now, this piece might comfort someone else who has been through something similar, or open up new conversations about how we value all forms of love, care, and family.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Picture by Ryan Hafey at Unsplash<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The invisible grief of almost-motherhood<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by Julia Llewellyn Smith<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Jeanette Brown started going out with a widower, she regarded his four children aged between five and 15 as nothing more than a pesky impediment. “I was panicking they’d hate me and it would scupper my relationship,” she recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anxious not to appear too pushy, Brown, 44, a receptionist from Hertfordshire, took things very slowly, waiting six months before she even stayed the night at her boyfriend’s house. The approach paid off. Slowly she got to know the children and – to her surprise – found they liked her and she liked them. “They were my kind of children, well-behaved, with good manners but also cheeky and a bit naughty.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a successful holiday with the family, Brown rapidly found herself becoming more and more involved in their lives. “I became involved in school events, I went shopping with the teenager.In hindsight, I was being prepared for full stepmotherhood.” But as her relationship with the children flourished, things with their father grew shakier. After 18 months, he told her it was over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I was really upset but after a couple of weeks I realised the crying wasn’t for my ex. It was for the children. We’d formed a really strong bond and I couldn’t bear to see it broken. I’d gone out with a divorced man before and become fond of his daughter but when we broke up I never saw her again. I thought ‘oh no, here we go again.’  “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown’s experience is very modern but increasingly usual. There are estimated to be around 500,000 stepfamilies in the UK but those statistics don’t include the thousands of people filling the more nebulous role of a parent’s girlfriend or boyfriend, who often  find themselves in loco parentis<\/em> to children with whom they have no formal connection whatsoever. While some of these relationships may be fraught, others are roaring successes. But the adults break up (and statistically second marriages are more likely to fail than first marriages), then the non-parents may find themselves cut off from children they have come to love and without any legal recourse.  It’s as if the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music<\/em> had failed to persuade Maria to return to Captain Von Trapp, and the film had ended with Maria bereft and the motherless brood feeling more abandoned than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Maria, Brown did not get back with her widower. But after a short break she continued to see the children, taking them out once a month. “It was a bit strange at first, but they were so pleased to see me. Then my ex asked if I’d like to go skiing with them. It was odd, but I thought ‘Bugger it, I’ll do it’ and we had a brilliant time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months later, she accompanied the family again on a summer holiday. “It worked really well, better in fact now I wasn’t trying to be dad’s girlfriend. He shared a room with one of the children, I had my own. There was no awkwardness between us; the children kept us so busy we hardly had time to exchange a word. I had a great time and it took the strain off him.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, nearly two years later, Brown has become an enriching force in the childrens’ lives and vice versa. “It’s hard to define my status. The children have a nanny, so it’s not that they lack a female presence. I’m not a stepmother, because I don’t have to worry about discipline. I had to put the littlest one to bed recently and it was bedlam, because I couldn’t bring myself to get cross with him. I suppose it’s a bit like being a grandparent but one who can run with them and do rounders, a sort of an honorary aunt. All I know is it’s a very happy situation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Linda Mellor of the Second Wives Club, an organisation that supports second wives and stepmothers and regularly sees the question of how to stay in touch with an ex’s children, warns that such heartwarming endings are rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Sometimes the woman may have only been with the father a few months. But sometimes when the father’s had custody and the mother’s been uninvolved,  she may effectively have brought the children up, been an integral part of their schooling and their teenage years. Then she finds herself unceremoniously shoved aside and it’s very difficult. If its’ been an acrimonious end, there’s usually no hope for negotiation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martine Mussies knows this to her cost. Now 27, she was 18 when she fell in love with a fellow musician. He had custody of three sons aged two, four and six, as his ex wife was ill and unable to care for them. Like Brown, Mussies was nervous of meeting the boys. “The first time they were very shy, but at the end of the day, they all hugged me and didn’t want to let me go. I think they really needed a mother. I was deeply touched.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mussies moved in and stayed for the next five years. Rapidly she became the boy’s de-facto<\/em> mother, even finding a teaching job at their school so she could spend as much time with them as possible. “I used to study with them playing around my feet. I got up for them in the middle of the night. I could not have loved them more. Old ladies would shake their heads when they saw us in the supermarket and complain about teenage mothers. It just made me laugh.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, things were not going so well with her boyfriend. “After just a couple of years, he was cheating on me and being very aggressive. My mother thought I should try to hold on for the sake of the boys. I tried, sticking around for another three years. But every day things got worse . In the end I had to leave him and he was very angry.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last time she saw the children was when she went to their house to collect her possessions. “They were crying and saying ‘Will we see you tomorrow?’ My ex reassured them that we’d meet very soon but once they’d gone to bed, he said: ‘You’re never going to see them again.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years on, Mussies’s every attempt to see the children has been denied. “Their father is marrying another woman soon and I don’t fit into the picture of the new family he wants to build. It’s so painful, I think about them every day. I’ve sent them presents but I’m not sure if they’ve received them. ” She has managed an occasional phone call, when the father is at work and the oldest child sends her text messages and emails. “But not being able to cuddle them breaks my heart,” she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year after the break up, they emailed her with an up-to-date photo. “It was such a shock, they’d changed so much I realised I might no longer recognise them in the street. It was good to see that they’d developed, that they looked happy and were wearing nice clothes that the new girlfriend must have bought. But it was still difficult.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Denise Knowles of the counselling service Relate says such cases are not uncommon. “Obviously it’s very tough for children to abruptly lose touch with someone they regard almost as a mother. My advice to the parents is, as with primary couple relationships. not to use children as a way of getting at your ex. Try to be magnanimous, no matter how unpleasant the break up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Knowles also warns against forcing children to keep in touch. “It’s tough enough for them to have seen their parent go through what may have been yet another break-up, without then feeling obliged to keep in contact. You see children with three or four ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ all wanting a piece of them. But they should never be coerced into maintaining a relationship they don’t want. Teenagers, particularly, just may not care as much about their parents’ ex, as she cared about them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opposite, however, can also be true. Yvonne Marsh, 48, a teacher from north London, grew very fond of her boyfriend’s daughter whom she knew between the ages of nine and 14. But after they broke up, she began to find the daughter’s demands overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She was a very unhappy girl – no doubt as the result of her parents divorcing when she was seven – and she grew very attached to me and my two daughters from my first marriage. At first I was eager to maintain the relationship, but quickly it all became too much. She was going off the rails: she had an eating disorder, she was getting involved with a bad crowd at school. I felt for her, but her father had dumped me quite brutally. Ignoble as it sounds, I didn’t see why his child should be my problem, especially when my own children had worries of their own. In the end, I had to break off all contact. I felt horribly guilty but it all was just too draining.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even without specific problems, many ex-stepparents and children find staying in touch harder than they anticipated. In Lynda Mellor’s experience, such relationships usually peter out. “There are sporadic meet ups but then the ex will move away, meet new someone new and it dwindles to birthday and Christmas cards, the odd email. When the blood connection isn’t there, there isn’t an inbuilt receptor to stay in contact, no matter how well meaning everyone is.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carolyn French, 55, a secretary from Brighton, had always seen herself as a big sister figure to her long-term partner’s son whom she had known since the age of five. But when they split up after 23 years, she was surprised at the awkwardness between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Before we’d always been at his dad’s house doing family things like eating lunch, watching television, quite often ignoring each other. But now we found ourselves going on what seemed like dates – to the cinema or for a meal and making small talk. His dad had treated me badly and he felt guilty about that, yet at the same time that was where his primal loyalties lay. We’ve more or less stopped seeing each other now and it’s a stone of sadness on my heart.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeanette Brown is optimistic she will prove the exception to the rule, although she acknowledges things may become trickier if her ex marries again. Martine Mussies is less confident. Her new boyfriend would like to have children with her. But she feels she needs more time to get over the ones she has lost. “I know I should move on but I can’t help hoping that when the boys are older they’ll come and find me. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to have my own child. My feelings for my ex’s three are so strong, I’m not sure there will be room in my heart to love another child.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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