Things Movies Always Get Wrong About Being A Mom

Maybe it's a reflection of mothers striving for perfection in the home that makes being a stepmother so difficult. Wednesday Martin, author of Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do, helped field some stepmom concerns on the NPR podcast Dear Sugars. In response to one stepmother who wrote in saying she struggled with the idea of loving her husband's kids like her own, Martin explained that she's never interviewed a woman who said being a stepmother was easy. "If anybody said that, within 15 minutes, we were getting into the nitty-gritty, which always involved resentment, anxiety, feelings of failure."

So why do movies — particularly Disney films — insist on portraying stepmothers as evil incarnate? Sara Abdel Aziz, a stepmother and writer for What Women Want (who also happens to be a linguist in pursuit of her third master's degree) is calling for a re-evaluation of how the stepmother stereotype is portrayed in movies. "My stepdaughter deserves a better version of her good stepmother. I deserve a better version of me to be told to my stepdaughter."