In the first edition of the famous book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, published in 1812, the story that has become known as "Snow White" had a different villain than the one we all know and hate. Snow White's original nemesis was her biological mother. In later editions, the evil queen became the heroine's stepmother in order to make the story less scary for children. It's easy to assume that had the Grimms not made this change, Walt Disney would have.

The wicked stepmother is an enduring trope in literature, which doesn't mean it's a reflection of reality. Abusive stepmothers exist, but the fact that the Grimms themselves had to alter a folk tale to make it palatable to literate children and the refined sensibilities of their parents just goes to show how appalling is the idea of a woman mistreating the issue of her womb. Mean fathers we can accept to a certain degree, but mean mothers contradict the natural order.

This image was turned on its head in the recent NHK drama "Te no Hira no Memo" ("Palm Memo"), about the trial of a widowed career woman accused of neglecting her 6-year-old son. The story's potential for explicating the complex feelings motherhood engenders was squandered by a plot twist that revealed the defendant was not the boy's natural mother. His death, it turned out, was due to a momentary failure of will on her part, and it became clear that the woman loved him. What at first seemed like a frank portrait of a mother who couldn't live up to the ideal became a story about a woman who, contrary to conventional expectations, adored her stepson.