An Excerpt from My Article-in-Progress: "A Mom by Any Other Name: Fulltime Stepmoms, Adopted Children, and Invisible Families"

In this autoethnography, I discuss my and other fulltime stepmoms’ experiences and perspectives and the implications for notions of who is family and to whom “belong” maternal rights and responsibilities themselves. I also consider some of the challenges that come with the particularity of my own situation as a fulltime stepmom to an internationally adopted child.

I have somewhat arbitrarily defined fulltime stepmothers as women who live with their partner along with their partner’s child(ren) at least 2/3 of the year for at least two years. Just like any other kind of mother, one does not necessarily love the children from the first moment, and some adjustment period is warranted. In many cases this period may require more than two years; nonetheless, after two years we have achieved substantial understanding and ability to reflect on our situations as necessary to my current project. Amy Janan Johnson et al. would characterize us as either mostly residential or fully residential stepmothers (130). I further note that in Jason B. Whiting et al.’s ethnographic study of self-identified “Successful Stepmothers,” all had been married for at least 5.5 years (99); these authors indicate that “research suggests that it takes 5 to 7 years for a family to stabilize following a remarriage” (107).

In August 2021, I gained IRB approval, with the invaluable guidance of Dr. Sarah Chard, and interviewed three other self-identified fulltime stepmoms, whom I met through a social media group (of which I had been a member for almost 2 years), who meet my criteria, as above, and who volunteered to participate. I do not claim a representative sample and did not even collect demographic data. I was concerned that reporting with too much precision and detail would compromise my participants’ confidentiality; fulltime stepmoms’ situations tend to be unique as it is, in my experience. Instead, I just want more of our perspectives heard and realities recognized. I hope that other scholars are motivated to pursue further ethnographic research with this population.

Johnson, Amy Janan, Kevin B. Wright, Elizabeth A. Craig, Elaine S. Gilchrist, Lindsay T. Lane, and Michel M. Haigh. “A Model for Predicting Stress Levels and Marital Satisfaction for Stepmothers Utilizing a Stress and Coping Approach.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 25, no. 1, 2008, pp. 119–142. DOI: 10.1177/0265407507086809

Whiting, Jason B., Donna R. Smith, Tammy Barnett, and Erika L. Grafsky. “Overcoming the Cinderella Myth: A Mixed Methods Study of Successful Stepmothers.” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, vol. 47, no. 1/2, 2007, pp. 95-109.

Cultural Event 1: Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation monthly meeting today

Today I (virtually) attended part of the Baltimore City CHAP meeting. I was running late from a previous meeting and then struggled to log in, so I missed the first 8 minutes and stayed later to make up for it. The entire hour and a half that I was in attendance, the discussion centered on BGE's claim that, to maximize safety, they have to install natural gas components outside historic homes, which seems to have only become the case within the past couple of months. This installation represents, at the very least, aesthetic and very possibly structural integrity problems for these homes. Speakers included the commissioners, community members, and BGE representatives. I found the community members more convincing than the BGE representatives; I was inevitably thinking of my own recent experiences with BGE as I made that assessment though.

On 6 Oct 2021, Verizon, without notifying anyone (including Miss Utility!) ahead of time, sent contractors to dig up our and our next-door neighbor's front yards to hook up service for someone ... around the corner? (At least, the contractors claimed that they worked for Verizon. Verizon later claimed that they had no record of having sent anyone to do that work and could not identify these workers.) In the process they hit the gas main and caused a gas leak in my front yard but didn't attempt to inform my family, who was mostly home at the time. The fire department quickly arrived, followed by BGE, who checked near our front door (for leaking gas?) with some kind of gauge, which I witnessed thanks to our Ring doorbell system. BGE also called Miss Utility to report the emergency dig they had to do after the leak. After we all left, BGE turned off our gas, requiring us to call them to arrange an inspection to get it turned back on, which we did. Later, BGE informed us that whatever they did to turn our gas back on that day was temporary. They were going to need to make another appointment with us for another visit out here to fully repair the damage.

On 12 Oct, BGE made their third trip to our home in a week to explain that the repair that they still need to do is actually replacing our entire gas line because the current one is too close to the surface. Also it runs oddly diagonally across our yard. This project will involve ripping up part of our street and our yard, although they promise that they will fix all of it eventually. They will leave the old line where it is, but they will no longer use it at that point.

However, when a company came to do landscaping repair on the yards, as BGE had promised, they told us that they had not been told to do anything in our yard. We called BGE, who sent someone to our house again, unannounced, while I was in between back-to-back meetings. Their argument was that the ticket they'd given to the repair company included our yard, and that ticket was marked completed, so the landscaping company must have repaired our yard.

... Not everyone understands logic.

Of course, if grass doesn't grow in the spring, we can call BGE, and they'll get it fixed then, right?

A larger concern is the fact that all the houses on our street were built by the same company around the same time (in 1972). Shouldn't one at least suspect that their gas lines were also too shallow and in need of replacement then? Or are they really going to only do what they saw they have to do and not even check everyone else's? It seems, unfortunately, that the latter is the case. No one else's lines were replaced while the street was ripped up -- just ours. We did deliver a note to all of our neighbors urging them to consider demanding that BGE inspect their gas lines too.

The important takeaway for me, however, was that BGE is indeed more concerned with minimizing costs than with any sort of responsibility to the communities they serve. That is why I found the community members more credible.

Of course, I did not stay long enough to learn the outcome of the discussion, and I couldn't quite read the commissioners during the meeting well enough to determine where they seemed to be leaning on this issue. I realized when I looked up the above link for CHAP that it is part of the Baltimore City government. Consequently, I have to wonder how well they serve their intended purpose and the community members who come before them. How much power to supersede BGE does this committee have? How do commissioners get these positions? And do they typically go way over the planned times for discussions? If so, what happens to the discussions they don't get to when the meeting finally ends? Is there a risk that that may happen next month, when the Sarah Ann Street homes are on the agenda?

The Politics of Community

The "professional" media representations of Poppleton just don't focus on the stories coming out of the people in Poppleton. They are always a sidebar or an afterthought, typically not even mentioned by name. The journalists never ask hard-hitting questions of the developers, such as whether the cost of their "low-income" units is comparable to what the people they've displaced were paying for their preexisting homes or where they are spending the public money they earn locally or how they masquerade as locals to enable their own profit. The reporters never push back when the developers even lie outright, such as when Dan Bythewood claimed that they had doubled (!) the number of low-income housing units in Baltimore.

The phrase "community in transition" reminds me of relevant readings we did in Dawn Biehler's Environmental Justice course last semester. Just hearing the phrase immediately makes wary the people likely impacted by any transition, and justifiably so. They will be understandably concerned that they retain what they need after any transition. Another meaning of "transition" is, after all, death.

Their concern is not cause to exclude them from the planning and the process, even though they may be reluctant. Rather, they must not only have a seat at the table but also a just share of the decision-making and change-making processes throughout. The Center West developers are not working with the existing Poppleton community at all.

As I indicated in class, in the public documents for the Save Our Block movement, I would like to see more emphasis on the issues. In addition to what I mentioned in class (reorganization and a bit of explicit articulation of the broader context of robbing Black families of community, stability, and generational wealth without in-kind replacement):

• I'd like us to add the word "redlining" to the timeline in the zine.
• I suggest we add a bit of emphasis to crucial words throughout so that they jump out at a reader just skimming the booklet.
• Perhaps we could add a few adjectives.
• I'd love to be able to do a bit of proofreading too.

My PowerPoint presentation on a chapter of Baltimore Revisited

I read, summarized, and analyzed Joshua Clark Davis's chapter, "More Than a Store: Activist Businesses in Baltimore," from Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, eds. P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Davis, Rutgers UP, 2019, pp. 118-127. Here, as promised, is my slide show from class yesterday, with links below each slide image:

https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/769

https://everyonesplacestore.com/

https://redemmas.org/

https://www.taharkabrothers.com/

Reflection on Community & Neighborhoods in Baltimore

 Here's a photo of

 my younger son DJ 

taking riding lessons

at The City Ranch.

Before this course, the only Baltimore horse folks I knew of worked at The City Ranch, a nonprofit horseback riding stable in Windsor Mill my family used early in the pandemic. I have learned, however, that Baltimore City has "arabbers," street vendors that sell produce from horse-drawn wagons. I love horses but had never seen nor heard of this tradition continuing here before this month! I am especially interested because both my mom's and my dad's families sold produce from roadside stands while they were growing up, and I don't know much about what that entailed either. I hope to get to learn more about this feature of Baltimore.

I did find a photo essay online at the Smithsonian featuring the arabbers, but I have mixed feelings about it. The artist chose to use only black-and-white photos, which emphasizes the pastness of the traditional practice. Today, I would choose to use color to emphasize the presence of the arabbers, to recognize the character and charm of Baltimore City now.

However, I currently feel more concerned with helping the Poppleton families who are at immediate risk of losing their homes.

I intentionally opted not to use the word "community" for the arabbers above because that feels presumptuous since I know so little about them yet. So far, the course has made me more conscious of the word and its possible implications.

In the past 8+ years of living and working in and around Baltimore, I feel that I have gotten snapshots of the city without knowing much context or even the names of the neighborhoods I was in. I played coed flag football in a park near the industrial area by the waterfront. I taught test preparation at an all-boys Catholic high school, at the charter school on the grounds of Coppin State, at Notre Dame, and, frequently, at the Inn at the Colonnade just off N Charles St. Many of my LSAT students in the ND course were deeply involved in social justice work -- much more so than the students I encountered in LSAT courses I taught elsewhere. Just last month, I collected signatures at the bus stop by the nearby Mondawmin Mall to try to get a measure for a Baltimore Area Transit Authority on the ballot in Baltimore City this fall.

The students in that ND LSAT course became a community in ways I didn't see in any of the courses I taught in College Park, which often felt fraught with racial tensions. They quickly formed a study group and met regularly in addition to the class sessions. They celebrated together after they took the test. They became friends. One of them began sending me lengthy messages in the wee hours of the morning on LinkedIn as she tried to adjust to a new place and into her internship with The Innocence Project.

So in that sense, I now feel that a community must entail more than a place and an interest in common. It must include a sense of belonging, some fellow-feeling, as Tahira Chloe Mahdi defines in her introduction to her dissertation (Membership vs. Being of the Community: A Qualitative Study of the Go-Go Music-Cultural Community, UMBC, 2018). In particular, her discussion of community as filling a need (5) resonated with me, both in terms of my own example of a community, in my remembrance of this example, and in other communities I have encountered. I look forward to enhancing my personal understanding further as we continue to progress in the course.

Leading the Discussion

In "Introduction to Racial Equity," the first chapter of his book The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lawrence T. Brown offers a credible proposal as to how to achieve residential racial equity in the U.S. He uses Baltimore as an exemplar of extreme racial hypersegregation and posits that what works here would work everywhere. His main points are that equity cannot come to pass without historical understanding and full, intentional redress nor without "collective self-determination" (4) and "community ownership" in all local interventions (5). Most of the rest of this chapter consists of fruitful definitions of the terms he will use throughout the book as he outlines each aspect of his 5-step proposal.

I liked that Brown named the recent period of antiracist activism ("The Great Rebellion," 2014-2020, the first wave consisting of "urban uprisings from 2014-2017," and the second wave consisting of the protests after George Floyd's murder in 2020, p.10), although I think that it is premature to give an ending date to that right now. Nonetheless, I agree that it feels as though there has been increased activism in this moment, and it is consistent with my own observations in my dissertation research so far (in which I saw an uptick in news coverage of Native American activism in 2013 start to effect changes in cultural norms about racist language and imagery). His term will be useful for me in that work.

This discussion was on the page we are missing from our PDF. If you'd like, read it yourself, along with a useful definition of gentrification, on Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&

Questions:

• Brown is, as he writes, intentional about effective language use (15). He offers a metaphor of war in the introduction to this chapter, choosing words such as "invasion" and "war" to refer to both the depiction of Black migration by White elites and their response to it (3). Also, on the page that we're missing, Brown writes: "Historian Douglas Egerton called post-Civil War violence the 'Wars of Reconstruction' roughly covering the period between 1866 and 1876" (10). How does that historical contextualization make the epigraph, the Frederick Douglass quote at the beginning, and the Abraham Lincoln quote at the end, applicable to the entire chapter and the issues therein? What could you understand those quotes to mean, in other words, if you took them out of the context of the Civil War and applied them instead to Brown's call for following the required steps toward residential and educational racial equity? What do you think of war as a metaphor for redressing injustice, and, if your response to it is negative, can you find cause to reconsider your own response?

• Likewise, Brown mentions that he "use[s] hurricane categories as an analogy to describe metropolitan areas" in accordance with their level of segregation. How is this metaphor apt but also inapt for the causes and consequences of residential segregation? Why does word choice matter in a book like this one?

Here is a paragraph I found explaining more clearly those five Massey-Tannen dimensions of segregation, for those who are interested:

"Conceptually, hypersegregation occurs when a group has high segregation scores on four or five different dimensions of segregation. The first dimension is evenness: the extent to which all the neighborhoods in a metropolitan area show the same distribution of groups as the total area. Thus, if an area is 20 percent black and 80 percent white, there would be no segregation if each neighborhood had that racial distribution as well. Evenness is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity . . . the most commonly used measure of segregation. The next dimension is isolation: the extent to which a group shares its neighborhoods with only members of its own group. While evenness looks at distributions across all neighborhoods in a city or metropolitan area, isolation provides the view from within neighborhoods. A group may live in only a subset of the neighborhoods in a city, but if those neighborhoods are relatively integrated, the group has contacts outside their group, and their segregation is not as severe as when their neighborhoods are occupied only by their own group. The third dimension, concentration, refers to the relative proportion of the total land area a group occupies relative to the group’s size. This dimension addresses the issues of crowding, population density, and the advantages associated with housing on spacious suburban lots. Centralization, the fourth dimension, measures how close to the central business district a group resides. In the past, the central business district was not a desirable place to live because of the presence of factories, and in more recent years it reflects the disadvantage associated with not living in the suburbs, where many jobs are now located. The last dimension of segregation, clustering, looks at whether the neighborhoods where a group lives are themselves clustered into one large area or are scattered throughout the metropolitan area. It addresses the aspect of whether a group member, regardless of the composition of their neighborhood of residence, interacts with nongroup members if they leave their neighborhood. In hypersegregated metropolitan areas, black neighborhoods tend to form large contiguous ghettos." ("Hypersegregation," Sociology, http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/hypersegregation, viewed 15 Feb 2022)

• Do you agree that what works in Baltimore, if also enacted locally elsewhere, would work to achieve spatial equity everywhere in the U.S.?

Introduction

My name is Jessica Burstrem, and I am a second-year PhD student in the UMBC Language, Literacy & Culture program. I am interested in successful social movements. My dissertation will discuss the history of the 50-year Native American movement to get the Washington football team (now the Commanders) to change their name, with particular focus on the activists' final tactic of activist investing and the context of that moment when the team finally agreed. I hope to gather oral histories from participants in that movement. In return, I plan to ask potential narrators what they would like me to do with those stories so that I can serve their interests in addition to my own as I seek my degree.

I expect that this definition will change this semester, but right now I would define a community as a group with something in common and a shared space of some kind in which to interact. (It is possible that the shared space could be all that members of a community have in common.)

As I mentioned in class, I rely on some online communities for support. Two of those are social media groups: one formed for primarily the GenX women of American Mensa, and the other a group of fulltime stepmoms.

The photo here is of my family: my husband Eric, my older son Alex (age 20), my younger son DJ (age 10), and one of my cats, Georgie (age 4). Alex is my biological son, and Eric is his stepdad. DJ is officially my stepson, and Eric is his adoptive father; DJ lives with us over 85% of the time. Prior to August 2021, it was nearly 95% of the time, and DJ's legal mother had never had more of a presence in his life than that. Since Eric and I got married in 2018 and throughout the pandemic so far, I have been DJ's primary caregiver. I am his first permanent residential mother, and it has long been true that there is no woman he has spent more time with than me.

But most people don't even recognize me as a mother to him. Further, most people, in my experience, are unsympathetic to mothers in general. I can go to my women's group for a lot of things -- advice, encouragement, accountability, a sounding board, a listening ear -- but not for most issues related to parenting, and what parenting groups I did have were not sufficient once Eric and I got married.

Therefore, a couple of years ago, in desperate need for a supportive group that I wouldn't have to educate in order to get a little commiseration and understanding, I sought out a fulltime stepmoms group on social media. I have never met any of these moms in person, although I did interview a few of them for a research project this summer.

While I have yet to find a community that can sympathize with my particular situation -- as a fulltime stepmom to an internationally adopted child of a different race and ethnicity from my own -- and that can therefore understand the particularities of those aspects of our situation, this community of women often fulfills some previously unmet needs for me. That's what we all do for each other.