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  • The Paris Review

    The Evil Stepmother

    by Sabrina Orah Mark Apr 03, 2019 6 minutes

    Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

    Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905

    The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job.

    I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail.

    When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry.

    On weekends, my seventeen-year-old

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