Please read this StepTalkers - it's from Wednesday Martin's blog. An entry from May 2009. Do yourselves a favour and check out her website, she's full of insight .......

"Some stepmothers really are horrible bitches. I know mine was!!

Whenever there’s an accusation that a woman is a stepmonster, the research shows, there is likely a much wider sickness in the stepfamily system. There is likely to be a mother who is exacerbating her child’s loyalty binds by giving him or her the sense that liking stepmom would be a betrayal of mom. There is likely to be a father who has refused to demonstrate to his child that he is committed to his marriage and that rudeness toward stepmom is not okay. And there is likely to be a child who had a difficult adolescence or other rough patch adjusting to the remarriage that he and stepmom didn’t have the groundwork or support to get over afterwards. Still insisting your stepmother is 100% villain and you are 100% victim? You might want to ask yourself whether stepmom isn’t acting as a lightning rod here. What was dad’s role? Why did he allow this? Is it just easier to be angrier at stepmom than to admit that dad seems to have betrayed you? Is your real issue with him? Finally, how old are you now, and how far in the past does your antipathy toward your stepmother extend? Do you think you can get over this, or at least ask yourself whether things weren’t a little more nuanced than you remember?

As for abusive and horrid stepmothers, I suppose that like abusive, horrid mothers, they are out there. But most people don’t have them. The portraits draw in the last three decades of psychological and sociological research shows that most stepmothers are trying very, very, hard in a difficult and frequently thankless situation."