Stepladies, I just returned from BlogHer, the largest chick-centric blogging conference of the year. I give it an F, for fantastic!

The conference was in Chicago, so for four days and three nights I was single in the city again, sleeping on creamy, dreamy hotel sheets and within walking distance of a summer-sweetened Lake Michigan. Add to that, I was sharing the Sheraton conference halls with more than a thousand women who blog about their remarkable and ordinary lives. The sense of sisterhood was potent, and I was inspired.

Just one little complaint: we stepladies were sadly underrepresented.

Stepmom blogger Erin of the Erin Experiment and I palled around and we met a sprinkling of other steps, but they weren’t introducing themselves as “stepmom bloggers” like we were. They just happened to be stepmoms who blogged about something else, like crafts or politics or horticulture.

That’s curious, I thought at first. Why are my fellow steps burying their stepmom status so far down on the list? Why aren’t they OUT and waving the FREE TIDE SWAG like Erin and I?

Ladies, here’s what I came up with: STEPMOM AINT SEXY

Now before you click off this site in an infuriated huff, hold on! I’m not saying that stepmoms aren’t sexy because we are. Just take a look at the collection of beauties on stepchicks or cruise the stepmom spotlight archives and it’s clear we got it goin on.

You know the story… We’re a new generation of strong, sophisticated and independent women. If you’re like me, you put your career before marriage and self-care before parenting. At a time when our more traditional girlfriends were birthing babes and buying disposable diapers, we were racking up a disposable income that we often spent on clothes, facials and weight training. If nothing else, we’re a sexy bunch!

So you can imagine why I was confused when, teetering in killer heels and flashing my decolletage, I said, ” I’m Izzy Rose, a stepmom blogger,” and was greeted with dispassionate smiles from my BlogHer sisters.

It wasn’t until the second cocktail party that I finally got it. I was singing along with a Fiona Apple wannabe on the karaoke stage.. What I need is a good defense cause I’m feelin like a criminal… when it hit me…It’s the name, stupid!

STEPMOM. It. just. falls. flat.

And even though Julia Roberts played one, “stepmom” still has junky baggage connected to it– the kind of bag you don’t want to bring to a cocktail party apparently.

It’s been a few days now since BlogHer and I’ve had time to rest and recoup. What comes next seems clear. We have two choices; one, we give ourselves a new name or two; we honor the fifteen million women in the country today who are stepmoms and WE BRING SEXY BACK.

Join the discussion here or on twitter @stepmothersmilk

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