My Step Mother.

We have heard of this relationship, "stepmother" from many stories, have seen plays and movies in which they are a character and have a bad impression in general about this relation. "Mother" the most lovable person on earth and the sweetest term to be addressed with. But why "stepmother" is a bitterly remembered word, just a word "step" prefixed and the sweetness of the relationship is gone forever in our thoughts. If I am a divorced or widowed and is thinking of remarriage, I do not want to marry a man who is already having kids, because, I do not want to be a stepmother to the kids ... I am good, I would not behave the kid different but the kid may treat me bad, may not regard me as a mother, so why get into complicities. Well, it is about a few days back when I came across this old lady, a motherly, caring soul with full of experience of life. We talked a lot (she talked actually, I listened with nods in between). While talking about her childhood, she started talked of her mother (stepmother, actually), without whom, she would not have achieved all that she achieved in her life. She had lost her mother at a very young age. Being the oldest of all the siblings, she had to take care of the home and the kids and had stopped going to school. Then came her new mother, the angel as she described her, who made the life so easy, took care of all the kids along with her own kids. Her new mother insisted her to resume her studies. She studied, excelled and grew up to be a self-sufficient woman. She worked as a headmistress in her professional life and today at her late eighties, she gives her stepmother, all the credits of what she is today. Is not it too much a lovely story to understand, that a name-of-a-relationship does not define the relation, rather we ourselves give a definition to the relationship that we live up.