Step-family Talk

Whatever the living circumstances, conflict is the norm rather than the exception, say stepfamilies and the psychotherapists who counsel them. High expectations, jealousies, divided loyalties, problems with the ex and lingering hurt often combine to turn blended households into battlegrounds and family members into fairy tale clichés: more Cinderella’s twisted stepfamily than “The Brady Bunch.”

I think this one paragraph from an article in the New York Times called A Family Feud That is Familiar, is an excellent summation of stepfamily life, especially the early years. However, does everyone have to keep going back to Cinderella? For the first two or three years our stepfamily was filled will all of those things listed in the article, but I would never in a million years put myself in the part of Cinderella’s stepmother!

Give me a break! There’s a big difference between the normal feelings of stepfamily life and turning your stepchild into your servant. The thing with Cinderella’s stepmother is that she didn’t care for Cinderella, was jealous of her, and was therefore, intentionally cruel. I know that my stepdaughter hasn’t always liked the things that I’ve done, but I can honestly say that I’ve always had her best interests at heart and have never, not once, treated her in a cruel manor.

I’m sure there are bad stepparents out there that have been cruel to their stepchildren, but I know that there are more of us truly good stepparents out there making a positive difference in our stepchildren’s lives. Get off the Cinderella story already, and focus on good stepparents for a change!

We got some surprising news this week. My stepdaughter’s mother is getting married. My stepdaughter, April is very excited, but I have to admit to some misgivings. I’m thrilled that her mother is so happy, as the happier she is, the less likely she is to cause trouble for us. However, April is a very beautiful 14 year-old so I’m having trouble with the idea of her living with a man her mother met on the Internet only two months ago.

I’ve done some research, but can’t find any stepfamily advice on this particular topic. The long and the short of it is there’s really nothing we can do, but I would really like some type of assurance that this guy isn’t a registered sex offender. Okay, so maybe that’s a little over the top, but I’m sure you know where I’m coming from.

I was going to try to do one of those on-line background checks just to ease my mind, but I don’t have enough information on him to do it. Short of asking for it, I don’t know of any way to get it. I’ve already pulled more information out of April than I should have.

So I guess this is one of those times I’m just going to have to turn this over to God and let him watch over her. I think this is the hardest part of being a stepparent. I love her and want to make sure she’s safe, but in situations like this, there’s nothing I can do to protect her.

While cruising the net this evening, I stumbled across an essay written by Maureen F. McHugh called The Evil Stepmother. There are a lot of excellent points in this essay and things I had never thought about. Take this passage for example:

Stepmother’s don’t represent good things for children. When I married Adam’s father it meant that Adam could not have his father and mother back together without somehow getting me out of the picture. It meant that he would have to accept a stranger who he didn’t know and maybe wouldn’t really like into his home. It meant he was nearly powerless. It doesn’t really matter that Adam’s father and mother weren’t going to get back together, because Adam wanted to see his mom, and he wanted to be with his dad, and the way that it was easiest for him to get both those things was for his parents to be together.

This was a big problem when my husband and I got engaged. Not long after we met, my stepdaughter’s mother, to whom my husband had never been married, dumped her fiancé. She told my stepdaughter, April, that if I were dead, her parents would get back together. Not only did she tell April this, but she had her practice threatening to kill me. Keep in mind that April was only six at the time. The next weekend we had her, one of the first things April says to me is “I’m going to kill you so my parents can get back together again.” A few minutes later, her mother called to make sure she had told me. It made for a very unpleasant weekend.

But after reading this article, it puts all that into a new perspective for me. It must really suck not to have any control over such a huge part of your life. The really tragic thing is that when we come into the picture as stepparents; the damage has already been done. There’s nothing that can be done to put the child’s parents back together. All we can do is move forward and try to make things as good for those children as possible. But I feel sure that there are plenty of us stepparents out there doing just that!

My counselor sent me this article today and it was so true of stepfamily life that I had to share it. The article is called Trying Marriage Again and was published on the Cincinniti.com Web site.

When she wants to demonstrate the pressures couples face in a second marriage, stepfamily expert Elizabeth Einstein gets out the ropes. She asks a couple at one of her workshops to tie themselves together, signifying the bonds of remarriage. Then she gets volunteers from the audience, representing children and ex-spouses from the first marriage, to tie themselves to the couple.

Einstein loads down the couple with luggage, each piece labeled with issues common in remarriage, such as anger, guilt, unrealistic expectations and fear of another divorce. Then she blindfolds the couple, signifying denial. Finally, with the couple being pulled every which way, Einstein instructs them to get close and be intimate.

Darn near impossible. And that’s the point.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it in this light, but it’s so very true! Your marriage has tons of baggage and oh so many extra people when you marry into a stepfamily. The trick is to figure out how to unload the extra baggage since, obviously, there’s no way to unload the extra people. The article also tells a couple of stories about sucessful stepfamiles and provides a list of Tips for Stepfamily Success.

Yesterday, I had one of those truly great moments with my stepdaughter, April, that remind me why its so important to just keep hanging in there as a stepparent. So I really must share it with you.

April was helping me make a fruit salad which is one of her favorites. While we chopped fruit, she was talking about going to high school next year and how she really wanted to play a sport. Unfortunately, she’s never really played or participated in sports up to this point so she’s not at the same level of ability as her peers.

I told her I thought that was the greatest disadvantage she had experienced with living in two separate households. My husband and I have tried to get her involved in several activities; but, for whatever reason, her mother would take April the first couple of times and then decide it was inconvenient and she would stop going. Since we thought this was setting a bad example for sticking with commitments, we stopped signing her up for things.

As we continued to talk, she confided in me that she really wanted to find something she was good at. She talked about cheerleading, dance and gymnastics; but, what she really wanted to do was tae kwon do. She knew her mother wouldn’t agree to take her or help pay for the lessons as she doesn’t think tae kwon do is appropriate for girls, so April was very discouraged.

Since she never confides in me and I was so touched, I’m currently scouring the web trying to find someplace for her to take tae kwon do. I’m bound and determined that she’s going to find her thing. My hubby and I had a fight about it, because he thinks we shouldn’t pay for anything her mother doesn’t agree to pay half of, but I’m sick of all the fighting. I told him that I was paying for it out of my own money and he could just deal with it. I’m so tired of April getting the short end of the stick because her mother is so selfish. Just this once, I’m going to make sure she gets to do what she wants!

I stumbled across an article from 2000 published by the New York Times called Differences Found in Care with Stepmothers. As a stepmother, I found the article very offensive; but I guess if the studies say it’s so, it must be so. It starts out like this:

Children raised in families with stepmothers are likely to have less health care, less education and less money spent on their food than children raised by their biological mothers, three studies by a Princeton economist have found.

The studies examined the care and resources that parents said they gave to children and did not assess the quality of the relationships or the parents’ feelings and motives.

But experts said that while the findings did not establish the image of the wicked stepmother as true, they supported the conclusion that, for complex reasons, stepmothers do invest less in children than biological mothers do, with fathers, to a large extent, leaving to women the responsibility for the family’s welfare.

Based on my own situation, I just find this so hard to believe. I know that being a stepmother is hard, but how do we as stepparents not ensure that our stepchildren are receiving the same opportunities and care as our own children? Less money spent on food; I mean really!

Then again, thinking about it on a much smaller scale, my stepdaughter has participated in very few extracurricular activities. We paid for a couple of different things like gymnastics and karate, but since we only have her 50 percent of the time, we had to rely on her mother to take her when she was with her. Since she rarely did so, we stopped paying for things as she wasn’t fully participating and it seem to us to be a waste of money. Still that’s a long way from not spending as much money on her health and education!

And to think, I often worry about investing more time in my stepdaughter because of all of the turmoil in her life, than I do in my son. Just goes to show that this study is not representative of all of us stepparents. There are plenty of us trying to do the right thing for our stepchildren!

One of my cousins and her husband are meeting with a lawyer tomorrow regarding custody of his daughter. In an effort to give them some guidance on questions they should ask, I went back through some of our court documents from our first go round with custody and child support.

Just reading through the documents makes me furious! There’s not enough room on this Web site to list everything that ticks me off, so let’s just talk about child support. I get the basic principle behind it: a child shouldn’t have to live in a shack half the time and a mansion the other half. But shouldn’t this be on a more case by case basis?

For us, we have my stepdaughter, April, half of the time. My husband works full time and makes a decent salary. April’s mother only works 15 to 20 hours a week because she’s “too busy being a single mother to work full time.” The court always figures her salary at full time, but she makes so little that we still end up paying out the nose. In addition to the child support, we are still responsible for 50 percent of all of April’s activities and uninsured medical expenses. What exactly does that leave to be paid with the child support?

April’s maternal grandparents fully support their daughter, financially. They bought both her house and her car and pay all of her utility bills. She wears designer clothes, goes to the salon regularly to have her hair and nails done and takes several vacations a year. I ask you, does this sound like someone who is using her child support to take care of her daughter?

I don’t think I would mind so much if there was some type of accountability for how the money is spent. If I knew for sure the money was being spent on April, I wouldn’t have a problem. Since I know for a fact that isn’t the case, it just makes me furious. Sorry, don’t mean to sound bitter, this is just one of my stepmother hot buttons!

I just found my new favorite Stepfamily Web site! It’s called Stepfamily Talk and instead of reading a lot of articles, you can download their radio shows on a variety of stepfamily related topics. Being a busy mom, I love anything I can download to my MP3 player to listen to while driving the car, working out at the gym or buying groceries.

They also offer podcasts to which you can subscribe for free using iTunes or another type of feed reader such as Google Reader which will notify you when a new podcast becomes available.

I’ve only listened to a few of the radio shows thus far, but the information provided is very insightful and well presented. I especially liked the one on Stepmoms and Their Husbands’ Ex-Wives. In my seven years as a stepmom, I’ve yet to figure out how to get along with my stepdaughter’s mother. I’ve tried a lot of different things, but the advice in this radio show was new. I’m going to try to put some of it into practice and see how things go!

Being a woman, I know more stepmothers than stepfathers, but the few I do know don’t seem to have the same types of stories that us stepmothers do. I’ve often wondered why that is so I did a little research and found an article on the National Stepfamily Resources Center Web site called Why Is Stepmothering More Difficult than Stepfathering?

Overwhelmingly the literature paints a bleaker picture of life as a stepmother than as a stepfather. In fact, some have argued that stepmother-stepchild relationships have the potential to be particularly problematic for both stepmothers and stepchildren. This is particularly true when the stepchild resides with the father and his new wife.

Consider for a moment the obstacles residential stepmothers likely encounter. We know that after divorce noncustodial mothers maintain more frequent and consistent contact with their children in comparison to noncustodial fathers. As such, mothers are more likely to interfere, consciously or unconsciously, with the development of a bond between residential stepmothers and stepchildren. In addition, children’s attachment to their mothers is believed to be stronger than their attachment to fathers. This stronger attachment may make it more difficult for children to accept another mother-figure in their lives than for them to accept another father-figure.

While I don’t necessarily like or agree with the idea that children have a stronger attachment to their mothers than their fathers, I do agree that we women tend be to more interfering. Sorry, but it’s the truth. It’s just the way we are. We like to be right there in the middle of everything, especially where our children are concerned. We can’t help ourselves.

The article suggests having the father play a more active role in the care and discipline of their children. Come up with some rules upon which you both agree and let the father enforce those roles. I can tell you from personal experience that this works. As a matter of fact, it was the only thing we found that worked. Not only did my stepdaughter react better to discipline from her father, but it cut way back on my stress level. It’s a win-win situation!

In my years as a stepparent, I’ve read a lot of books, articles and Web sites on stepparenting. One thing that always strikes me is how no one can seem to agree on what stepfamilies are to be called. Some refer to them as stepfamilies others blended families and still others bonus families.

The following excerpt is from the Frequently Asked Questions section of the National Stepfamily Resource Center Web site:

As a general rule, the term stepfamily is preferred because it is consistent with the naming of all other family types. All other family types are defined by the parent-child relationships (e.g., biological, foster, adoptive, single-parent).

While the choice of stepfamily (and any step attribution) is seen by some as negative (the wicked stepmother, treated poorly as a stepchild, etc.), SAA and stepfamilies hope that, through education, the term stepfamily will acquire a positive, or at the very least a neutral, connotation.

Personally, I like the idea of changing the negative image that surrounds the stepfamily rather than renaming it to something else. I am a stepmother and consider it every bit as important and positive as being a mother.

I like the story that Jann Blackstone-Ford tells about the origins of bonus, and the reason behind it. However, I couldn’t see myself calling my stepdaughter my bonus daughter. She would think I was insane. And since she’s a teenager, I feel certain she would never refer to me as her bonus mom. Frankly, I doubt she thinks of me that way. I would be more of the I’m-stuck-with-you-and-don’t-have-a-choice Mom.

All of that said, I think what it all boils down to is that a family is a family no matter what you call it: step, blended or otherwise.

The biggest mistake I made as a stepparent was trying to love my stepdaughter like she was my own daughter. There are people in my own family who fight me on this anytime it comes up in conversation, but what it boils down to is that my stepdaughter truly isn’t my daughter. I love her very much and consider her to be a part of our family; however, she has a mother who already loves her in a way that I never can. Not because I don’t want to, but because that place in her heart is already filled.

When we first married, at the advice of my mother-in-law, I tried to do for April, my stepdaughter, just as I thought I would do for my own child. Not that I really knew what that meant since I didn’t have any children of my own at the time. I would try to show her affection, give her advice or discipline her when she’d done something wrong and I would get a whole face-full of very vocal resentment and dislike.

Then she would call my mother-in-law and tell her how mean I was. My mother-in-law would then call me and ask me why I wasn’t loving April like she was my own. I finally told my mother-in-law to put a sock in it, and backed way the heck off. I spent more time in my room reading trashy romance novels on the weekends we had April so she and my husband could spend quality time together and I left all of the advice giving and discipline to my husband. I even cut back on the affection and let her come to me. It worked like a charm.

The true advice in all of this is don’t listen to people like my well-meaning mother-in-law who have never been part of a stepfamily. It’s something you only understand when you’ve been there yourself.

One of the other top five things I did wrong when I became a stepparent was neglecting to take care of myself. I became so focused on taking care of my stepdaughter and my new husband that I forgot to make time for myself. Everything was just so overwhelming and there always seemed to be a hundred things to do.

It didn’t take me long to feel stressed out, exhausted and seriously taken for granted which of course led to additional friction in our stepfamily. When I started counseling, one of the first things they had me do was start making time for myself. I went to the gym, started taking yoga classes, and bowled with the girls one night a week.

You know how they say you can’t take care of everyone else if you don’t take care of yourself? Well they aren’t lying. It made a huge difference in my stepfamily and I know it will in yours too. Take a look at these great articles to get you started.

Making Time for Yourself

Ten Ways to Carve Out “Me Time” – This article is written for single parents, but the tips are good and apply to us stepparents as well.

When you are part of a stepfamily, you get so focused on making sure the kids and stepkids are doing well, that you often forget about your spouse. When I do something, I do it to the max. So when I really put my mind to being the best stepparent I could be, I totally forgot about everything else. My relationship with my stepdaughter was better than it had ever been, but my marriage was starting to suffer.

My hubby and I sat down and had a heart-to-heart talk about our relationship and what was missing. We made a real effort to make time for each other and do fun things together. We started having regular date nights, made time to spend together each evening and ran away together once or twice a year.

We hit a rough spot when we got additional custody of my stepdaughter, April. We went from having her every-other-weekend to having her nearly 50 percent of the time. At first, we thought it was selfish to be away from her when she was with us and we stopped going out. It didn’t take us long to realize that we needed the time. Plus, we wanted to show April that we had a strong relationship. Happy parents make for happy children!

There’s a great article on the Family Education site called Making Time to Be with Your Spouse. Check it out!

This week, we’re talking about the top five things I did wrong as a stepparent. The second thing I did wrong was not seeking out the support of others.

About six months after we were married, I came very close to having a full out nervous breakdown. We were getting nasty phone calls from my stepdaughter’s mother, hate mail from her mother’s parents, my mother-in-law was constantly on my case about how I was treating April, my stepdaughter, and it got to the point where I was afraid to answer my phone or get the mail. I cried nearly all of the time and our life was one constant battle after another.

My parents noticed that something was wrong and made sure I got the help I needed. I started counseling and that’s when I realized I had done so many things wrong. I started reading every book I could find on stepfamily life, joined an on-line discussion board for stepmothers and sought out people who had either been raised as stepchildren or who were stepparents themselves.

It was then that I realized that I’m not alone. There are lots of other stepparents out there that have similar experiences and have been through the same things. Just knowing I wasn’t alone, made all the difference and I finally took my first steps toward being the stepparent I wanted to be.

There are lots of on-line discussion boards for stepfamilies and resources to help you find support groups in your area. Here are a few that I found.

Message Boards
Step Together
Steps for Stepmothers

Helpful Articles
Starting a Stepfamily Support Group
How To Find a Competent Christian Stepfamily Therapist

As this is the beginning of my blog, I thought the best place to start would be at the beginning of my journey as a stepmother. Therefore, here are the top five things I did wrong when I first became a stepparent:

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