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| Plano Star Courier |
Once-bitter stepmother-stepdaughter bond evolves into book collaboration
By Shawn Floyd
Kali Schnieders learned her lesson.
Now she wants others to learn, so they don't make the same mistakes she made in rearing her stepdaughter, Elizabeth Schnieders. Instead of fuming, the two have penned a book together. Due out on Friday, the book has the dual title of "You're Not My Mom," Elizabeth Schnieders' portion, along with her stepmom's part, "Confessions of a Formerly 'Wicked' Stepmother."
With the book's debut approaching, Kali Schnieders will teach a series of three classes from 7 to 9 p.m. the next three Thursdays at Grace Presbyterian Church in Plano. Next month, she will teach a similar class at 7 p.m. May 17 at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Piano.
In both instances, Schnieders plans to touch on topics such as the emotions children face when a parent remarries and the competition between parents and children.
Schnieders certainly knows something about competition, having competed in the 1972 Miss World USA pageant that was won by "Wonder Woman's" Lynda Carter. She was Miss Missouri in that event, and she said while losing the title was a letdown, it made her realize "you should never compare yourself to anyone else or compete with anyone else."
She says, "You should just be your best self and let the chips fall where they may."
It was the experience of pageant competition that made her realize what she was doing wrong with her stepdaughter.
"I was in competition with Elizabeth and her mother," says Schnieders. "And then I stopped competing with her mother. It was like the people in the movie 'Stepmom,' where the mother is dying and the stepmother is about to take her place. Only in my situation, the mother had already died before I met my stepdaughter."
Standing ready to give advice when it may be needed, Schnieders, who also wrote the book "Truffles from Heaven," says it's easy to let the competitive spirit get the best of you.
"You stand next to Lynda Carter in a swimsuit and you're competitive, believe me," says Schnieders. "But then I realized that God made me unique, and as an original there was no one else like me. And once I started realizing that the competitive spirit started to melt away I could help other women."
Elizabeth Schnieders, a graduate of Plano Senior High, now lives in Denver, where she is in the graduate business program at Denver University. Because their relationship is a long-distance one, she and her stepmother wrote the book by sending e-mail messages to each other.
All this fraternizing represents a serious turnaround in their relationship from the days when they didn't speak - or if they did, it wasn't very pretty. What gives? "Once she was in college, I would go to the mother/daughter weekends and this provided an opportunity for us to develop a one-on-one relationship," says Kali Schnieders. "If only I had known that before, it would have saved us a lot of grief."
As it was, Schnieders and her husband, Larry, married after he had been widowed and she had been divorced. His daughter was 8 at the time, and Schnieders says everyone went into the marriage with good intentions that soon fizzled out.
"I was a woman without a child and she was a child without a mother, and I thought this has got to work," says Schnieders. "It was a dream come true for all of us. Larry had a wife and partner who would play golf with him and go to dinner and movies, and someone who could be a mother to his child. And I had a prince."
But, she says, the problem was that her husband was also her stepdaughter's prince and she and Elizabeth each turned into "Cinderella."
And while that may be accept able in the books, it's anything but a fairytale in real life.
"The competition and power plays began," says Schnieders. "We were soon in a tug of war and a love-hate relationship. To me it felt like she got the rope and I got the rope burn."
Schnieders says it took years and a lot of painful experiences to admit she was wrong.
"At the time I married Larry, I was a corporate businesswoman," she says. "I had never even babysat and knew nothing about kids."
She says it wasn't until the family moved from Missouri to Texas that she began putting her feelings on paper.
"We decided as a family that I would quit my job and stay home and take care of Elizabeth," she says. "The only thing was that Elizabeth was going into middle school at that time and didn't need me as much as she would have if she were in elementary school. And then I had these problems and pent-up feelings with losing a career and also both of my parents. But I couldn't vent them because I didn't know anyone. So I started writing and that's when I wrote my first book, 'Truffles from Heaven.'"
Now that her stepdaughter has left the nest and is about to be married, and Schnieders
is spending more time with her husband, who retired a couple years ago, she has time to write, teach and speak to groups about her experiences.
Mainly, she tells audiences about relationships and how to take the bitter with the sweet, which is the premise of her first book. But now that her second book, published by NavPress, will soon be out, the focus will be on family relationships.
Besides their own relationship, the two women also touch on Larry Schnieders' role as a father and husband. Kali Schnieders says that for years, her husband was the "man in the middle. He had two women under his roof and he loved them both dearly.
"The poor man would walk through the house and say, 'Harmony, just give me harmony.'"
The stepmother part of the book-writing duo has included tips and pointers in her book. One of these is for the birth parent. "It would have been helpful if he would have been able to hear my comments as Iove rather than crlticism. In other words, correcting bad behavior to a form of love."
The most interesting part about it all is that, she says, her own childhood experience in some ways parallels her stepdaughter's.
"My mother raised me by herself after my father left home," she says. "And because I was an only child, I didn't have to learn how to share my toys and get along with other children, and as an only child Elizabeth didn't have the opportunities to learn those things either."
Now, the two women enjoy each other's company. Kali Schnieders will be mother of the bride at Elizabeth Schnieders' fall wedding. She even went along to help pick out the wedding gown and says, "We both cried."
Even tough things appear to be seamless on the outside, Kali Schnieders says "the old patterns can rear their heads if you're not vigilant. I have to take extra care to think of it more like my own relationship with my own mother. I have to look at Elizabeth as an adult child and though my tendencies are to parent, I have to not parent if we are going to have a great relationship."
She warns others that it's not always easy to get to where she is now.
"The whole goal is to keep these blended families in the Cuisinart," says Schnieders, who is known for signing "Wicked no more" on her notes to others.
"You know its hard. It isn't for sissies I'm telling people to hold on and wait for their miracle to happen, because it was a miracle that Elizabeth and I came out to be best friends."
"We've beat the odds and we want others to do the same and know the harmony that we now enjoy."
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